Mastering the Live Class “Triple-Dip” with Coach Darius
If you’ve spent time in the Kettlebell space, you’ve come across Coach Darius Gilbert. And even if you’ve never run into Coach D himself, you’ve definitely seen a post, class or workshop from one of his many incredible mentees. Coach Darius has been a Russian Kettlebell Certified (RKC) instructor since 2008, and in 2018 he founded Dynamic Sports Performance, which now offers the Dynamic Sports Performance Coaching Certification (DSPCC). He’s trained and certified thousands of the top coaches in the Kettlebell industry over the past decade.
During the pandemic, Coach Darius needed a way to continue providing top-tier training for his students. He started a virtual Kettlebell Master Class, where he taught high-level concepts for an hour at 9am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. To get the class and running, he stitched together a streaming service, a personal website and a payments platform, while keeping track of class pack credits on pen and paper and manually sending out class recordings to anyone who wanted one.
By creating this virtual business, Coach Darius was able to reach a much broader audience and, from the start, it was clear that his expanded audience had been waiting for a class like this. The Master Class quickly became the go-to class for excellent coaches to get their reps up in a virtual room full of their peers.
Unfortunately, increased demand for the class resulted in increased demands on the “Tech Stack” that Coach Darius had built. Managing memberships by hand and sending out Zoom links doesn’t exactly “scale”. Operations quickly became overwhelming and Coach Darius found himself struggling to manage the demands of his students. Manual labor was costing Coach Darius money and time. This was when Coach Darius started to think about partnering his business with a platform.
When Coach Darius moved his business on to Somble, it was immediately a night and day difference. He could schedule his classes, set drop-in pricing, add memberships, and then just start teaching. There was absolutely nothing for him to worry about or manage. He just showed up MWF at 9am and got rolling. About 3 months in, he bluntly told the Somble team “This would have saved me $100,000 in lost revenue over the past 20 years. I’ve been losing money trying to track people’s memberships and promotions on my own”.
With the improved functionality that the platform offered over his existing setup through his website, Coach Darius built bigger. His classes recorded automatically via Somble’s in-house streaming service and uploaded straight to his library. Some of his students purchased memberships, many dropped-in to classes, while others purchased his on-demand recordings to learn on their own time. Coach Darius even packaged some of his recordings into a 10 video program that clients looking for a more structured experience could purchase for a single price.
He’s mastered the art of what we call the triple dip: stream a class, record it to build a library, then turn those recordings into different programs. And at the end of the day, all Coach Darius was doing was showing up at 9am on MWF and teaching.
Because he offered multiple ways for clients to engage with him (live vs on-demand, drop-in vs subscription vs class pack), he was able to unlock a huge % of his total available client base. 6 months in, he had built up an audience of more than 100 people taking his classes.
With Somble handling logistics, Coach Darius was able to expand his operation further. He now runs several in-person certifications through the Somble platform, all from the same page as his Master Class and content library. He’s used the Somble network to grow his client base and partner with gyms to host certifications. He even leverages Somble’s collaborative functionality to bring guest coaches on board to teach certain classes on his behalf.
Coach Darius’ business is the perfect example of what happens when an amazing coach meets an amazing platform.
