The Great eCourse Adventure

We changed our business model and pricing. We’re stoked. Here’s why.

It can be so hard to be confident about “the right thing to do” when making certain decisions in our businesses.

And the thing is, we only ever find out if a certain decision is the right one or not by trying it.

Here at eCourse Adventures, we love experimenting with new ways of doing things, learning from the process and sharing our discoveries.

Right now is, yet again, another leap of faith and lesson to share.

So what’s the topic at hand?

Pricing

You may or may not have struggled with pricing before, but it has certainly been a hot topic for us.

In the year and a half since launching the Great eCourse Adventure, we have gone through probably a dozen different pricing models.

  • One time payments ranging from $299-999.
  • Monthly recurring memberships.
  • Tiered membership levels.
  • Payment plans.
  • The works…!

We’ve tried every trick in the book, and so far nothing has felt completely authentic and in alignment with our bigger vision (which we’ll get to in a moment).

The last pricing change we did definitely felt like the closest thing to being “it.”

We switched the pricing model from $997 one-time to $299 up front + $29/month, going with a more hybrid membership model.

When we came up with this pricing model, we were 98% sure that we’d nailed it!

However, deep down in our guts, we knew we were still missing the mark.

The upfront fee + monthly membership felt overly complicated.

And we were right.

Many people reached out to clarify how it worked. There were lots of questions about a seemingly simple thing, which is not a good sign.

The value was spectacular, but it was enough of a foreign concept that it caused many would-be adventurers to think on it and postpone their membership.

And as we all know, tomorrow never comes.

Honesty is the best policy

So we did some soul-searching and realized that our mission and our actions have not been in alignment.

We’ve been playing along with the industry standard approach of less sales at a higher dollar amount, thus creating what amounts to be something akin to an exclusive club.

What we really want is to lead and inspire a critical mass of innovative course creators to turn this whole industry on its head with wildly unique and transformational learning programs.

So the name of the game became clear.

  • Create the conditions so that The Great eCourse Adventure is an obvious no-brainer for anyone that wants to create effective courses.
  • Find a pricing model that is extremely easy to say yes to with minimal forethought, yet is sustainable to grow the biz.
  • Minimize risk for student purchases.
  • Get as many people on the mountain as possible, thus growing a thriving culture of innovative course creators.

We (finally) figured it out.

From now on, membership to The Great eCourse Adventure is just $35/mo.

Not only that, but every membership comes with a 14-day free trial to make sure you love the course, online community and weekly coaching sessions before you pay a dime.

Here are 7 reasons for why we are changing our prices

1. The upfront fee was out of alignment with our bigger vision.

Our mission is to create a thriving culture, community and marketplace (imagine the Netflix of eCourses) that is full of the greatest, most transformational courses on the planet.

In order to do that, we need A LOT of students creating innovative and transformative courses.

The piddly $299 upfront fee was stopping way too many people from getting started.

We want it to be a no-brainer for people to join the adventure.

Offering a 14-day free trial and a simple $35/month membership fee is as no-brainer as it gets to inspire people to jump on the trail with us.

We’re playing the long game and intend to keep our students engaged for many years to come.

2. What we were doing was not working.

We definitely thought that more people would have jumped on the adventure when we lowered the price from $1000 down to $299 + $29/month, but we wrong.

Sure we got a spike over the last few months of new members who were really grateful for the super affordable pricing, but it was not how we thought it would be.

They came in trickles rather than droves.

So after looking at our analytics and realizing it just wasn’t working, we were finally ready to surrender and say, “Screw it, let’s do it.”

We lowered the bar to entry to make it the easiest “YES” possible.

This idea is completely in alignment with the philosophies we share at our website, CoursesWorthSharing.com

Some folks say that prices this low would mean students don’t value the course. We say that’s bullshit.

3. We are following in the footsteps of teachers we love and trust.

How did we come up with $35/month you ask?

We talk about the crew at Fizzle.co a lot. They have one of our favourite podcasts and blogs.

We love them and totally align with their values, humour and way of doing business online.

They’ve done an amazing job growing their membership and online community.

Fizzle costs $35/month for their membership + community + coaching and to us, that sounds so easy, delightful and doable for folks to say yes to.

We recommend Fizzle to many of our students and feel great doing so because we know it’s a no-bs pricing model, anyone can afford it, and their training is the best in the industry.

Our hope is that others do the same for us.

4. We want to remove the energy of “Selling” from the sales experience.

We are so tired of all the gimmicky, hypey, manipulative ways people are selling their courses online.

“Hurry up the doors are closing in 8 hours!!!”

Yeah, whatever.

We’re ready for a fresh approach.

All we want do is create awesome products and experiences for our community, and cut out all the gimmicky marketing bullshit.

Currently we have three incredible freebie offerings, that if someone was to go through each of them in full, we have no doubts they’d know whether our adventure is for them or not.. Or at least if it’s worth a 14-day trial.

Courses Worth Sharing is an interactive website that teaches you our core philosophies on building eCourses in an engaging and enjoyable way.

The Art of eCourse Creation Masterclass takes you much deeper into how to craft a theme’ified, gamified, transformational eLearning experience.

Our Beyond the Blueprint newsletter shares the most innovative, inspiring and helpful resources & viewpoints in the world of online learning we can dig up. (you get this by signing up for the Masterclass)

With the quality of work we’re putting out and the new no-brainer price point, we don’t need to create a 10 mile long sales page and 4 part video series launch funnel.

If you want to learn course creation, it’s the obvious choice.

No need to play mindgames with you.

What a relief.

5. We want a steady and sustainable flow of new students, NOT feast-famine launches.

We’ve done our fair share of “launches”. It’s exhausting.

That and people are so tired of being launched to.

It’s really quite predictably annoying if you ask us.

Sure the business model works for some, but it’s not for us.

We are now building a business model that aligns with the lifestyle we want to be living.

Laid back, enjoyable, fun, creative, full of freedom, easy-going and consistent.

Rather than sporadic launches, we want a continuous stream of excited new people joining the adventure, growing our culture every single day.

This fresh infusion of new energy in the community feeds and inspires everyone on the mountain.

We’re choosing inclusivity over exclusivity.

It sure does feel good.

6. The $299 up front fee was coming from small, short-term thinking.

More important than $299 is helping as many people launch incredible courses as possible.

By charging the upfront fee, we were basically putting all our eggs in one basket, limiting ourselves to membership being our primary way to make money.

When we let go of the need to make $299 out of the gate, we opened ourselves up to many other creative ways we can generate income.

Here are some ways we’re considering growing our income and service to our community:

  1. Build a marketplace where we feature all of the courses our students create and launch, making us a small % on every sale that’s made. Kinda like a really small affiliate fee.
  1. eCourse audits, where we’ll go through your course and make suggestions on how it can be improved.
  2. Coaching or consulting with our students and their teams on curriculum or experience design.
  3. Licensing out our own eCourse creation tools, templates and technologies, which we’re in the process of building right now.
  4. Developing websites, membership platforms, online communities, gamifcation elements, branding packages, etc.. for our students.
  5. Video and audio production for students.
  6. And many other ideas we’re playing with…

We now see how small we were thinking and how much we were limiting ourselves by trying to make “more money now.”

Sound familiar?

7. Our new $35/month membership fee gives us predictable and sustainable income to be able to budget for upgrades, team building and creating new courses.

As we grow our team with the monthly income, we’ll be able to improve everything about our platform and business.

Walt Disney once said, “I don’t make movies to make money. I make money to make movies.”

We feel the same about building transformational courses and products.

The bigger of a community we grow, the more we’ll be able to create.

This new pricing feels like we’re opening our arms and hearts wide to the world and saying, “Here we are, here’s what we stand for, are you with us!?”

No longer will they answer, “I am, but I just can’t afford it or justify signing up right now. Maybe later”

Instead, they will be a “F-yes” or a “Nope, not for me”

We’d love to hear your thoughts or stories on any struggles you’ve gone through around pricing too. Or if you have feedback on our decision, we’d love to know. Share in the comments below!

Learn the Art of Creating Great eCourses

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Here at eCourse Adventures, we treat eLearning like an art-form.

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Leave a Comment:

10 comments
Jan Keck says April 21, 2017

Wow, what a journey! Can’t wait to check in after a couple months to see what has happened then 🙂

Reply
    Bradley Morris says April 25, 2017

    Ha! True story Jan. We’re really excited about the change in direction and have no doubts that it’s the right choice. Definitely looking forward to finding ways to collaborate with you guys on helping everyone look F$&*ing Awesome on Camera.

    Reply
    Bradley Morris says April 25, 2017

    Ha! True story Jan. We’re really excited about the change in direction and have no doubts that it’s the right choice. Definitely looking forward to finding ways to collaborate with you guys on helping everyone look F$&*ing Awesome on Camera.

    Reply
Teresah Harder says April 25, 2017

great plan! and a great model to follow 🙂

Reply
    Bradley Morris says April 27, 2017

    Cool. So glad you think so Teresah. It’s really exciting to see who’s showing up to the party now that it’s so open and easy to join. We were silly not to do this a long time ago. But hey, we live and we learn.

    Reply
Loan says April 26, 2017

Could I cancel my membership whenever I want? (Your explanations are cool but way damn too long! excuse my franktiness, I am french 🙂

Reply
    Bradley Morris says April 27, 2017

    hahaha You are totally excused. Sometimes we get really excited and babble a bit. We’re working on our refinement muscle to say what needs to be said with less. We promise Loan, we won’t let you down next time.

    As for the membership, you cancel whenever you want. Our goal is for you to fall in love with the course, community, coaching and all that you’re inspired to create through the journey up the mountain that you never ever wanna leave…

    I guess time shal tell 😉

    Reply
Geoff Johnson says April 26, 2017

Such a great re-boot, finally putting this e-course in my frugal but enthusiastic reach (those of us with the smallest carbon footprints by choice often have the least disposable income despite getting the best value for our choices). I’m ready to sign up as soon as I can know how many consecutive months are required, and whether taking a break (i.e. due to unexpected family or health issues) and later re-joining is an option. I think in the end this change will bring you guys better business, but I imagine my two questions are not uncommon. Whatever the answer is though, I’m sure the change is an improvement, and will have many of us on the mountain sooner than later. Tomorrow does actually always come, but we don’t all face the same conditions, so it comes at varying rates for various folks.

Reply
    Bradley Morris says April 27, 2017

    G’Day Geoff, stoked that you’re grateful and excited about the new pricing model. We’re feeling jolly good about it too, as are many others who are finding out about it.

    We hear you and appreciate you for your low carbon life-style. We are also living minimalistic lifestyles as best as we can from our perspective paradises and it seems that the people we want to serve are the creative, down to earth folks like yourself who are living a good life and wanna create really awesome stuff.

    To answer your question, you can cancel your account anytime by not paying anymore or pressing the cancel button, but we do not have a pause button. You’re either in or you’re out 😉

    We hope the fun of the mountains makes it so the health just keeps better and better so you don’t have to leave 🙂

    See you around the campfire real soon.

    Reply
    Andy Freist says April 27, 2017

    Hey Geoff! Thanks for the comment 🙂

    To answer your question, the amount of time it takes to get through the course is entirely up to you. We don’t release it in a drip-fed format or anything. Now that said, creating a course is not a quick and easy process, contrary to what most guru’s out there would love for you to believe. All great things in life take time, and it’s no different for an online course.

    You could pay for a month and binge-watch the entire course, then cancel your membership and apply what you’ve learned at your own pace. But truth be told, the real value of the membership is the community forum, which is priceless for course creators like you.

    You can cancel your membership at any time, but there is no ability to pause it and take a month or two off. You could cancel then re-join later, but you would be starting over from scratch.

    Considering the fact that most courses like this cost $2000, paying $35/mo for a couple months while you’re on vacation or doing other things is still a HUGE bargain. In contrast, by the time you’ve paid us $2000 you’d be at the 5 year mark and have received every single new thing that we’ve created along the way. (We’ve got big plans over the coming years)

    So our mission is to make our membership so valuable that it’s worth keeping even if you need to step away for a bit.

    Hope that helps!

    -Andy

    Reply
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