Packin’ up and leaving town?
Alert subscriber Peter gave me a heads up last week:
In the “Gold Rush,” the people that made all the money were the ones selling the tools and provisions for the prospectors.
An indicator that a Gold Rush is on the downward spiral is when the provision providers start to pack and leave town.
I spent thousands of dollars on Danny Inny’s Course Builders Laboratory which he’s been running since 2013. He’s closing down the course to new students forever – read the cut and paste below.
Maybe people are getting inundated with too many e-courses? There are so many now.
So, to my theory, what do think Josh? Are we on the downward slide of the e-course bell curve?
This was extremely interesting.
Like Peter I also went through Danny Inny’s “course on courses,” and it was excellent.
I used his approach to launch a workshop a couple of years back and earned a 300% ROI on my investment. I was one of the testimonials on Danny’s site.
The landscape has changed a lot in the last several years.
The biggest trend I’ve seen in the market I’m most familiar with is the growth of “all you can eat” and low-cost online course platforms.
The expectation these days is that a 27-hour video course “should” cost no more than $11.
Yes, you still see success stories about big launches from time to time. The course I was writing about last week is a good example—the launch brought in $75,000.
When I hear about these big launches in the software niche, I’ve noticed a very consistent pattern:
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They’re always about a very specific technology.
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That technology is in a period of explosive growth.
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There aren’t (yet) a lot of good resources available on the topic.
It’s gotten to where I can usually guess what the topic of the course is just from a 1-2 word description of the author’s background.
For the last couple of years whenever I heard “John Smith is a web developer who just earned $50,000 from launching his first course,” I could pretty much bet that he launched some kind of course related to the React toolkit for programming with JavaScript.
Unfortunately for course authors, conditions 2 and 3 in that list above tend to change very quickly—and when they do, demand for high-priced courses vanishes in a heartbeat.
I can count on one hand the entrepreneurs I know who seem to have created stable businesses that derive most or all of their income from online courses or digital products.
That doesn’t mean online courses are “dead.”
They’re still a good way to bring in supplementary income.
In 2019 though the market puts a lot less value on pure information.
This is a trend I expect to continue.