Blogger Earns $140,000 from Beta Phase of Online Course

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

I have something really fun for you today. It is a case study of an extremely successful online course launch from a good friend of mine. This friend is Paula Pant, who writes the Afford Anything blog and is an advocate for low-cost rental properties. I heard her talk a few years ago at another event, and then we brought her to WDS to speak to our community last year, a very popular talk as I expected. I also wrote about her in the book Side Hustle from Idea to Income in 27 Days. I remember doing this long email Q&A

with her because I was like, "Paula, I don't understand this whole rental property thing. Most people who talk about it, I don't think, are giving very good advice, but it seems like what you've done actually works really, really well. So how does it work? What do people need to know?" Anyway, I'll talk about that more in the episode, but before her official launch of this course, she earned $140,000 from Beta Testers. Paid Beta Testers, she earned $140,000. Then when she opens up the course, she does extremely well, even better

than the $140,000. Now Paula is the kind of person who deserves her success. She's extremely hardworking and she's also very open and transparent about how she achieved that success. So I was really excited to work on this story and bring it to you today on Side Hustle School. So prelaunch phase of Real Estate Course earns blogger $140,000 before launching an incredible but true story. Stay tuned.

Paula Pant got into real estate investing in 2011, when the housing market was just beginning to rebound after a recession. She turned out to be great at it. By the time she turned 34, she and her husband owned eight investment properties. And they did this without starting with a lot of capital. Paula shared a lot of what she'd learned on her blog and podcast, Afford Anything, becoming a well-respected voice in the worlds of smart money management, self-improvement, and of course, real estate investing. Her email list grew steadily over

the years. 1000, 10,000, 50,000 readers and more. These readers loved Paula because she had a down-to-earth philosophy behind everything she did. That philosophy is you can afford anything but not everything. So make your choices with intention and thoughtfulness.

I began following her myself at some point and I really appreciated her thoughtful and detailed blog. The only downside of her growing community was the hundreds of email questions she received. They were endless. She loved empowering people to take control of their finances and lifestyle, but she needed to find a way to offer more expertise in less time. The clear way forward was to create a course filled with all the things she'd learned over the years. So in 2015, Paula began planning that course called Your First

Rental Property. She figured it would take six to eight months to create it. Little did she know her estimate was off by over two years. The planning stage was a big one, going through everything she'd ever written on investing, outlining the flow of the course, filling in gaps for totally new content, double-checking to make sure everything was applicable to people in different areas. This stage alone took nearly five months. One of the issues

she ran into was the software that the course would run on. Most of the popular apps out there felt limited, clunky, and unbrandable. She wanted her course to not only have amazing content but feel natural and easy to use. She wasn't going to compromise on her student experience, so she gave up on the popular apps and hired a developer and graphic designer to create her own from scratch. By the end of the planning phase, she was pumped to begin filming her first course materials. She bought a teleprompter, camera, lights, and set up

a little home studio. Then she wrote and filmed several videos, but it wasn't easy. Making sure everything looked and sounded right was a huge pain that she didn't expect. Those first few videos took ages to film, re-film, and edit. She realized it was going to slow her way down to keep trying to hammer it out on her own, so she ditched the home setup and partnered with a local studio. Once Paula had a handful of videos uploaded, she decided

to do something unusual. She opened up her work-in-progress course to a limited group of beta testers. These would be paid beta testers. She had built rapport with her audience over the years with that thoughtful thorough content. They trusted her, and she knew she'd be able to find people willing to pay to get her course materials as they were released, rather than all at once. So in March 2016, when she announced on social media that she

was currently building a course, she sold all 50 beta seats in just four minutes, at about $500 per seat. That first round of beta testers stuck around for two whole years, as Paula continually released new videos, created helpful spreadsheets, and facilitated group discussions. The feedback she received was invaluable, and she took those suggestions and comments and was able to apply them immediately to the course she was building on the fly. Finally, in September 2018, Paula uploaded her final video. The course was almost complete, but now she needed a second round of beta testers to go through it in chronological order, rather than as videos were released. So she opened up another beta round, gaining

over 100 new students at $750 each. Between the beta rounds, before a single official launch, Paula earned over $140,000. As she went along, she monitored students' progress and continued to work tirelessly on her course. She was so close, but there was always a video script to change, a spreadsheet to improve. Eventually, Paula realized the thing that was really holding her back from finishing was herself. She was pursuing perfection.

She wanted her students to say the course was worth 10 times what they paid. But as month after month went by, she realized the course would never be done. She'd always be improving it. With the core modules of the course complete and tons of positive feedback, it was time. It was past time, really. So, over three years after she began working

on it, Paula finally opened your first rental property in April of 2019. There was no big sales page, no complex launch strategy. She wrote a single blog post and spent $16,000 in Facebook ads to get the word out to her fans. But that was it. Just to be clear here, key point, the money for the development and the $16,000 in Facebook ads came from the beta group. So all of her startup costs, all of her launch costs, advertising,

and so on came from that initial beta launch. Over 200 people signed up at the course's full price of $997 a person, bringing in around $200,000 in net income now that development expenses were covered. Again, over 200 people at about $1,000 a person. Tremendous success. Tremendous, tremendous success. And this is after all those beta testers who also paid

a pretty good amount. So what did she do next? Well, after one week, Paula closed the doors to her course. She's investing time in her current students and also overseeing even more improvements before her next bi-annual launch in September. She attributes her success to being a down-to-earth teacher who loves investing in her students. She gets in the weeds with them and she remains

present. She says now she loves the challenge of creating a course she's proud of, but it's not the work itself that's been the most rewarding part. She says she has seen students avoid making huge six-figure mistakes, which is what happens when you buy the wrong rental property. Saving someone from that type of life-altering mistake is incredibly gratifying. And there's no doubt this course has been incredibly gratifying to many of those students as well. So all of her hard work was well worth it.

Big story, right? What a huge success. Fantastic. And I honestly feel like the best is yet to come here because she's built this asset. She's going to do a relaunch twice a year.

Only good things can happen here. And again, Paula deserves her success. So it made me really happy to work on this story and learn more of the details. Okay, so what did she do right? Well, number one, first and foremost, she put in the work.

She worked really hard. She's been doing this herself for years and years, this particular real estate investing, buying these rental properties, and then documenting the process, just so thoroughly, so relentlessly, and then spending all that time with the beta group, spending all that time working on the videos, the spreadsheets, all the content, curriculum, making sure that it's very valuable. I mean, that's the number one thing. Then also, she was an authority. She had given a lot to her community over and over through the years with these detailed blog posts, informative podcasts, just being available.

And all that time, she never tried to sell them on anything except ideas. She was just being helpful. And then she showed people what she was working on along the way by announcing the course, by doing this paid beta launch. I mean, I thought that was so interesting. Selling seats at $500 each and then $750 each. I don't think I've actually heard of that

before, but it's really smart. I think it works well for someone like her who is going to just dive in and create stuff for months and months and months. I don't think it would work super well for everybody out there, but I think for somebody with her personality, with her in-depth knowledge, like her dedication to topic, to really staying within scope. And like, this is going to be my lane. This is what I'm going to be working on for months and months, as I said. And for somebody who likes to work hard, of course.

Now in the end, it's not actually surprising that the first launch, the official launch, once she finally came to it, the official product launch did as well as it did. The $200,000. Now she's setting herself up for recurring success again and again. So here's a question for you, you know, if you enjoyed the story, why doesn't she launch all the time? Why doesn't it just stay open? Because here's a very valuable resource. She's

got the authority. She's got the social proof. You know, it's obviously we're very well done. Why isn't it just to open all the time? So we'll talk about that later in the week. I'm

going to save it. I'm going to come back to this discussion because I think it's so good. And I bet some of our listeners already have a pretty good idea why that might be. We'll dive into it in more detail, perhaps in the upcoming weekly recap. All right. I hope you enjoyed this one. Like I said, I enjoyed working on it. Inspiration

is good, but inspiration with action is better. There's a project out there for you too. I know there is. So keep searching and keep working. Today's show notes, including links to Paula and everything else I mentioned are at sidehustleschool.com/961 episode 961.

Thanks so much, my friends. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.