This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey friends, hey listeners, welcome to the podcast. So about a month or two ago, I did a thing where I gave away copies of my newest course. The course is called Doing Things, A Guide to Neurodivergent Productivity. And I basically gave it away to any paying subscriber of my newsletter, yearofmentalhealth.com. People can subscribe for as little as $10 a month. And
rather than doing a big product launch for this whole course that I worked on for months, I decided to give it away free to anybody who had subscribed. And so a listener is kind of wondering today, asking me about it, like what was the strategy there? Like was it a crazy idea, a strategic plan or something else? And if you know me a little bit, you might guess it's probably somewhere in between. I don't know if it was a totally crazy idea, but it also wasn't a completely strategic plan. So I'm going to talk about it and maybe in the context of helping you figure out
for your next online course or for anything that you want to sell, how do you decide what the best way is to distribute it? There's all kinds of pricing strategies that we've talked about from time to time, but there's other ways to do it too. So maybe that's what I'll kind of delve into. We'll talk about the rationale behind that decision, what I hope to accomplish and how perhaps giving away something valuable can sometimes be more beneficial than charging for it. And you also don't have to do it just one way. And I'll talk about that in the answer as well. You can do
something for a while and then make a change. So let's hear the question and then I'm going to dive into some details of the answer. And by the way, thank you so much for being out there. All right. Detailed question coming right up.
Hi, my question is about your strategy for giving away an online course. I noticed that you did this recently and I'm curious what was the plan behind that? Most people sell their courses to make money, but I'd love to understand why you chose to give it away and what you hope to achieve. Was it about growing your audience, building trust or something else? Did you have an upsell plan after launching, for example? Okay, well, let me just give it to you straight. As always, it's not really a business
strategy. It wasn't like, "Oh, I've got this great strategic choice and it's going to lead into a huge product launch by doing it this way." The subtitle is of this course. The course is about doing things. It's a guide of neurodivergent productivity. I really am neurodivergent. I have ADHD. I tend to
start projects and work really hard on them and then I'm ready to move on to something else. And so in this case, I had actually made most of the course earlier in the year and I put a ton of work into it. But then after I finished working on it, I'd done so much with it that I wasn't really ready to like go into launch mode for it. I was like, "I need a break." And I was doing some other stuff, finishing up the book, the book Time Anxiety, which comes out in the spring. Basically, I had some other stuff on my plate. So then a few months goes by and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I got this course."
And I started watching some of the videos from it and I'm like, "Oh, this is really helpful. I should do something about this." And so since I hadn't planned a launch, I realized I just kept deferring that. And so I was like, "What can I do to neurodivergently, for lack of a better word, kind of nudge myself to move forward?" And I was like, "You know what I'll do is I will encourage people to join the newsletter because I do want people to do that and pay for that. It's not a big expense. But by paying for the newsletter, it kind of helps the algorithm." And I was like, "I'll nudge people towards that and I'll give it to them free. Of course, they can have it completely free, no
strings attached, no subscription payment. It doesn't go away. They don't get it and then it disappears in two weeks or whatever. They can have access to it for life if they subscribe or upgrade at the newsletter." And so it just seemed like the right idea. I mean, that's what I'm coming to.
It seemed like the right idea. I felt good about it. A long time ago, I learned from a friend, Danielle LaPorte, and she had this pricing model. She was a very serious entrepreneur. She'd done lots of stuff, but she talked about how she set prices for something almost intuitively. And she
just asked herself when she had something coming out, "How do I feel about this price?" Whatever it is. And if it felt right, she went for it. And I was like, "Well, that's really interesting because we're always encouraging people to make decisions with data and I think that's good. But your intuition can be a data point, presumably not the only one or hopefully not the only one, but that matters." So intuitively, I felt like that was right. But then I also, I don't want to say there's no business logic at all because by doing this, I can give it away to an initial group. I can then
sell it later. It will be for sale probably in the early part of the new year at some point for people who didn't take that offer. And then hopefully it can make money and serve even more people. And I've also got some feedback from the initial beta group, people who received it for free so I can make it better and so on. So I do think it kind of works out in the long run to do it that way. But in the end, I don't know if it was a crazy idea nor a strategic choice. It was more
like, "I made this thing. I don't want to just sit on it forever. Let's get it out there." And so that was the way that made sense to me. As I said, always giving it to you straight. That's the full story. But of course, let me know if you have any other questions about that or anything else. And
thank you so much for listening this year. We're almost at the end of the year, episode 2920-2920. I am grateful to our community of folks all over the world. The podcast, of course, is also free, completely free, available wherever you get your podcasts or directly on the website. I'm going to sign off now. I wish you happy holidays. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
From the Onward Project.
