How I Made $10,000 in Four Hours With an Online Course That Doesn’t Yet Exist
By 1:00pm on Thursday, February 9, I still hadn’t had enough time to think about anything at all. All I could think about since Hardbacon’s crowdfunding campaign launch earlier that morning at 9:00am were the countless tasks I had to finish as soon as possible.
Many of them were still left undone, but since doing a Facebook Live broadcast was on my list of things to do, I hit Facebook’s “Live” button on my cellphone.
I knew that we would cross the $10,000 mark within the next few minutes or hours, but I still hadn’t had enough time to think about it. I was on automatic pilot.
On the video, I stated that I would remain live until we reached our crowdfunding campaign’s financial objective of $10,000. Those words had barely come out of my mouth, when at 53 seconds into the video, my team informed me that we had just gone past the mark.
We popped open a bottle of bubbly to celebrate, but it took me time to really fathom what had just happened. I can honestly say that I never expected toreach my objective in only a few short hours. I had even increased the length of my campaign from 30 to 40 days, on the advice of Ulule’s CEO Alexandre Boucherot, who also gave us a lot of good help in terms of strategy.
Unfortunately for those who take my titles too literally, this success, as unexpected as it was, was the fruit of much more than 4 hours of work. In fact, we started getting ready for this campaign in November 2016. Even though we were reasonably well prepared, I doubted our chances to make the $10,000 mark.
My reasoning was as follows: The most successful projects on Kickstarter et al. are generally sophisticated gadgets offered at relatively low prices. The contributors then feel like they’re getting a good deal and, in addition, can prove to the world that they are “early adopters” by showing off gadgets that are not yet available for sale in the big stores.
When I investigated online courses that had used crowdfunding, I couldn’t find any that had received more than $30,000, as did an Australian course for mobile applications development on Kickstarter. And even then, it was a programming course with a worldwide market. For my part, what I had to sell was an investing course only intended for the Canadian market.
I’m still pinching myself. Even though we raised $31,662 so far, I have to admit we must have done few things right to make it happen.
Build an Audience
Last summer we began building an audience of people interested in learning more about investing in order to get ready to launch our mobile brokerage application. Thanks to our promise to provide exclusive content in our newsletter, and the subscription boxes we placed throughout our website, we managed to collect more than 5,000 email addresses in six months, essentially organically.
But building an audience isn’t just a matter of collecting emails in a database. Your audience must know who you are, click on your links, and reply to your emails. Without that, you don’t have an audience — you just have an email list.
At the rate of about two emails per month since last summer, I think I had managed to build a bond of trust with Hardbacon’s audience and it was clear that this relationship was a factor in our campaign’s success. To develop such a bond, you must avoid the trap of sending emails only when you need something (i.e. “Can you answer this survey please?”) or when you want to boast (“The medias are talking about us, yay!”).
Yet, this is precisely what many companies do in their newsletters.
As for me, I’ve always made sure we’ve offered something, like useful tips or an explanatory text at the beginning of each newsletter. After this opening text, I never hesitated to ask my audience for something. In fact, the only day when I bent this rule was on that Thursday morning, in an email in which I limited myself to asking our subscribers to contribute to our campaign and to share it in an email.
If I was able to do this without consequence, it’s because I already gave a lot to my subscribers.
Besides our newsletter, we created a second list of emails for people specifically interested in Not Another Boring Course About Investment. To do this, we added a web page before the Christmas holidays to briefly present our course, which garnered 274 email addresses in all. We should have promoted this page more to collect more email addresses, but we didn’t have the means.
Involving Our Audience
It seems obvious, but oftentimes a business will build an audience without interacting with it. And when I talk about interacting, it goes further than just doing surveys. It means dialoguing by email or phone, and it even means working together. In our case, we even developed a provisional course syllabus last summer in collaboration with our subscribers.
In fact, in one of my emails, I simply inserted a link to a Google Doc containing the course outline that could be modified by anyone with the link. I then asked our subscribers to modify the outline as they wished.
It was not abused. On the contrary — there were many very inspiring suggestions. I remember going into the document a few hours after having shared it, and being surprised to find myself in the company of a few dozen anonymous subscribers, who were in the process of reading and suggesting improvements to our course outline. So it’s a course that was designed specifically to address the needs of our audience and will be built in collaboration with it.
The collaboration is only beginning, however, as our Ulule campaign has enabled us to find no less than 422 supporters at the time of writing this article. It goes without saying that these supporters will not only be kept informed, but above all, they will be consulted throughout the development of the courses, for which shooting begins shortly.
In fact, we have already asked our contributors to determine what more could we offer when our campaign reaches objectives such as $25,000$, $30,000, and even $50,000. These stretch goals were also developed collaboratively.
This collaborative approach helps to develop the product our audience wants, but also makes our subscribers/contributors stakeholders in our success. Because Not Another Boring Course About Investment was never Hardbacon’s course; it’s our subscribers’ course. And it’s thanks to them that our campaign was so successful, much more than because of our marketing strategies.
Shoot a Good Video
They say that a crowdfunding campaign with a video earns three times more money than a campaign without video. In fact, having a video is essential, but it also has to be one that grab’s peoples’ attention so that they will want to watch until the end. And in 2017, the average attention span is rather short, so it’s easier said than done.
It is all the more important that a crowdfunding video includes a call to contribute, which usually happens at the end. For all of these reasons, we felt it important to produce a video, not exceeding two minutes, which provided an overview of our course’s value proposition… without being boring. Again, this is easier said than done, especially for someone like me, who tends to write long spiels.
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to work with Ceilidh Barlow Cash, Hardbacon’s Director of Content, who always finds a way to rework my sentences that don’t have enough punch.
Then, when we thought we had a good screenplay, we were quickly disappointed after meeting the director and cameraman Ian Marcoux, without whom our video wouldn’t have looked like much. He promptly schooled us on what should be shown to the camera, and which passages would look bland in a video.
He spent two days shooting the video for us. And yes, a two-minute videos required two days of shooting, mostly because the main actor wasn’t a natural in front of the camera… and because the cat, who for his part was a natural, but he did as he pleased.
The cat on a mountain of money certainly helped spread our video, but it was due to all of the work that the video helped us convince a lot of people that our course on investing wouldn’t be boring and that they should therefore pre-order it. For those who are interested, here’s the video:
Create Momentum
All of the above was paramount, but in my opinion, the key to our success was the prep work we did to create momentum on the day of the launch. First of all, I didn’t miss an opportunity to promote our crowdfunding campaign on my blog and in our newsletter. We also posted messages increasingly more frequently on the social media reminding our audience that the launch date was approaching.
In the same vein, we added a real-time countdown on our pre-campaign web page, displaying the days, hours and seconds remaining until the launch.
We also gave our audience a reason to want to pre-order our course on the day of the launch. We did this by offering an “early-bird” version of our course for $50 (instead of $60) to the first 100 people who chose this reward. This early-bird reward allowed us to remind people to contribute to our campaign as of 9:00am on the day of the launch. And many of them did, so much that the 100 early-bird rewards ran out within only a few hours on the same day.
The secret, however, behind the moment we created that Thursday was partly because of our network of ambassadors, and partly due to our campaign on Nouncy. These two initiatives combined enabled us to create a storm on social media when we launched. For some Montrealers, the Hardbacon campaign had somehow taken control of their Facebook newsfeeds.
Let’s begin with our network of ambassadors. It includes 35 influential men and women (yes, I know, there are more men than women, but we are working on it) who agreed to help us promote financial literacy in Canada through our campaign. To keep it short, I’ll only mentions those among them who are on Medium : Antony Diaz, CEO of Uvolt, Nikolai Ray, CEO of MREX, Christian Beaubien, co-founder of ADI Accelerator, Yann Rousselot-Pailley, CEO of 2PS, Michael K. Spencer, a rockstar copywriter, Duc C. Nguyên, a design guru and ilias Benjelloun, a startup sherpa working at Desjardins.
They were not paid to help us; they did it because they believe that promoting our course is a good thing. (You can see a complete listing of these ambassadors on our pre-launch website.)
It was Khadija Jouini, Hardbacon’s Director of Marketing at the time, who masterfully implemented this initiative. We created a specific ambassadors email list to keep them up to date on our campaign strategy and, on launch day, we gave them links and photos so that they had things to share. We also invited them to the campaign pre-launch party, which took place in Ulule’s offices, where there were bacon chips and bacon donuts on the menu.
In addition to our ambassadors, we convinced a group of people to share our Ulule campaign. The goal was to get the largest number of views on the social media in the shortest possible time. For this strategy, I did not limit myself to soliciting influencers only. I solicited as many people as possible, whether they had thousands or only a dozen friends or followers, to convince them to share our campaign that Thursday morning at 9:00am.
Knowing that most people are too busy to remember to share at an exact date and time, we very much insisted that people used Nouncy to pre-program their shares on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Nouncy, a tool similar to Thunderclap, requested their authorization to post in their name on their social network of choice, then all of these messages were posted at the same time on they day or our launch.
In all, 157 posts went live at the same time, for a total potential audience of 220,498. This does not include shares by influencers like Alexandre Taillefer and Jules Marcoux, who didn’t want to use Nouncy, but agreed to share our campaign Thursday.
So now that I’ve explained how we made $10,000 in 4 hours, I still need to figure out how to go from $30,000 to $50,000 with our Ulule campaign. Quite honestly, we were well prepared, but not for such a sudden, overwhelming success.
And since there are 35 millions Canadians, and a large percentage of these nice people don’t know what an ETF is, I get the feeling that we’ve underestimated the size of the market for this course.
If you liked this post, please click on heart below and share this to all your friends! Oh, and if you did not yet contribute to our crowdfunding campaign, keep in mind you can get our course at a 40% discount now… but it won’t last.
