Doubling Down On Courses (While Everyone Abandons Them)

0:00Look, I'm not going to lie. I have two courses for some university, and they both suck. They both suck. They're terrible. I shouldn't say they're terrible. They were good when I came out with them, but they have not been updated in, oh my god, close to 10 years, close to 10 years. The first course I came out with was in 2017, and it's 2015, so it's been a minute. And I have another idea on my list of things to talk about on the show, and the other one was how I'm doubling down on courses when it feels like everybody in my industry is fleeing them. And I want to explain why I'm doing that. So there's a couple of reasons or a couple of things that we're thinking about. So the first thing is that we have these two courses.

1:03They have been for sale. People have been buying them. We've gotten, I would say, close to zero returns, meaning no customer this past year in 2025 has returned a course because they took it and thought, oh, this is terrible. Now the course is not cheap. It's about $150 course. We've got a couple of returns on our hot tub course, but mainly because people were just, they bought the book, the book was so insanely good, and they're like, well, I don't think I need the course. And so that makes sense. But also, yeah, we really have an updated it, and I think that that's a problem. Now the reason we're doubling down on courses when I feel like everyone's pivoting is because I don't think, and it took me a long time to fully realize this. What the people that I follow in my world, other business owners, let's say, are mainly creators who are talking to me.

2:06So I'm the customer. And yes, those people, the ones who sell courses to help you make more money, right, business courses, they're pivoting away from that because we as the customer are sort of been oversold. There's so many business courses. There's just so many. There's so many YouTuber courses and all these things, and it's just like, we kind of burned down on it. But my audience, the audience that I speak to, which is people who own pools and hot tubs, they don't exist in this same world that I live in, where courses feel oversaturated, where there's so many courses. They don't see this world. They don't feel that pool. So for me, I'm like, well, if you look at our data, people are not buying as many courses as they used to.

3:08They're buying more books, but that's not because the courses themselves are bad, or because selling courses just doesn't work anymore. It's because we do not actively market and sell those courses. We are not doing that. And the question I get from people in this audience, and people I know are like, well, what's the difference between what's in your course and what's on your YouTube channel? And this is an important question. This is something to think about, and I did an episode about this. I remember I took a course once from this woman who was doing email marketing, or she was teaching email marketing. Now, on her YouTube channel, it was so polished, it was so well done, that I thought, oh, well, if her YouTube channel is so well done, her course must be that much better.

4:13And it was an expensive course. It was like a thousand bucks. So I'm thinking, all right, this has got to be pretty sick. And it couldn't have been further from it. Her polished YouTube videos were so much better than her course. But the way that she positioned the course was like, well, you're not necessarily paying for a course. You're paying for our templates. And I go, yeah, except I thought that even your templates were a bit thin. And you didn't have any video explaining how to set up the templates, how to reword them, how to use them, how to fit them into your, it was just for a thousand dollars. What she quickly, it seemed like this. And I'm not, I shouldn't say that this is what she did. But it appears to me as somebody who is a course creator and who's done, who's made products like this. She made an MVP and charged a lot of money for that MVP, where she just said, hey, look, I've been doing this for clients for so many years.

5:17I'm just going to take some of our best performing templates and put them all into like a into a course packaging platform and then sell it for a thousand dollars using my YouTube channel. And this is probably like bonus stuff. She probably thinks, well, I'm making most of my money with client services like whatever. This is just a side thing. But it was so obvious that there was no attention put towards this product. And I know I couldn't have been the only one who within a few hours was like, there's no way I'm paying a thousand dollars for this. There's not a single video in the course to explain anything. It was all text and I'm like, this is, this could have been a blog post. So I'm thinking about that and how there was a difference of positioning with that product. And again, people have asked me, excuse me here.

6:21People have asked me like, how is your course different from your YouTube channel? And I will say this every single time. If you're already asking that question, then don't bother buying the course. It is not for you. Because clearly I did not give enough value on the sales page. I did not provide enough value in even on YouTube for you to even ask that question. It means I've done a bad job. And that person is doesn't like, they're kind of asking to be sold to in that moment. The thing is it's like, I want to support you and I want to buy your course. But how is it? I go, no, no, no. You're already on YouTube. It's already free. Don't waste your money. Just go and watch every single YouTube video we've ever made. And you will invent your own curriculum. And you will learn everything we know. That is true. That's what's going to happen.

7:28That is true for literally anything. You could say, you could, you could never ever buy as an example. You do not have to buy Alex Hermosi's books. He has years and years of years and hours upon hours of free YouTube content and social media content. You could take a master class from him and never give him a scent. That is literally true for anyone. You want to know if there was a course made by a famous movie director, like Steven Spielberg. You don't have to take that course. You can just go on YouTube and find every single interview that that man has ever given about making movies. And you will have a master class in making movies. That is now true for everything. The information is free. It's available.

8:28So the fact that you're even asking that question means that you have no interest in this. You just want to be told or you want to be out of, oh, this is going to have something special in it. So it is, I think, a difference between what I keep thinking a course really is is just a better packaging of your free content. That's what I think it is. But it's really not. So again, like, I think the book example is great. You don't have to buy our book either, right? You can go on YouTube. You can read every single article on our website. And that's a book's worth of content there. You never, you don't have to buy the four hour work week. You just listen to Tim Ferriss has been putting all this content out for free. You don't have to consume these package products. They exist. And that information is not proprietary. It exists in so many other places. But the problem that they are solving is that they are highly, highly, highly, highly curated.

9:41And so the problem they're solving is time, not information. By getting our course, we are basically going to shortcut you from having to watch all of our videos and read all of our content. We are saying, just get the course. We've put this information in the correct order in which you need to learn it. We've added additional things that you wouldn't get from video and that you wouldn't get from our book. And combine everything into a different package. The thing that we are saving you is time. That's the, that's the real value. It's the value per minute, not the value per video or per information. And that's the real sales, that's the real sales goal. Currently, my course solves that problem because the, well, I'll say this, I thought that the information had to be presented differently.

10:50So I thought there needed to be a difference between what we put out on YouTube and what we put out on our course. Like, it literally has to be filmed differently or it has to be, instead of it being a script, I have to say it unscripted. But I'm like, well, no, if I do that, then I'm not solving the time problem. I'm creating more time because now I'm forcing you. So here's the thing. If you go and watch our course now, those videos are long because I didn't read from a script. I wasn't trying to edit down only the things you need to know. And I wasn't pairing it with specific use cases. Again, the goal of the course, which currently is not solved, is to save you time. It's to shortcut you the time it would take to learn all of the things. Because at the end of the day, here's what I realize, and it's different about my business than anything else.

11:58In the case of online business, and I don't know how you feel. But for me, I sometimes just like consuming it. Like, I'm not going to put anything that somebody says in the action. I'm just interested in learning about business. It's kind of just a hobby. It's an interest. Because of that, I subscribe to every single channel that talked about SEO, email marketing, affiliate marketing, selling products, creating products, Shopify, all that stuff. Like, I just subscribe and consume all of that content. And I will forever, because that's just my interest. That is not true in pull care. That is just not the avatar. If there is, if there is, they are super rare. They're crazy rare.

12:59But there's nobody who's just consuming pool education content, because it's just kind of fun. And they're just kind of interested. No, they are trying to solve a problem. And then they will never watch that shit again. Like, they will get the thing done and move on. It's a one time learning thing. I will continue to watch content about email marketing forever. It's always changing. I'm always coming up against new problems. My business is constantly growing. That's just the nature of the beast. In pools, you pretty much have one pool in your backyard. And once you solve the problem, you're done. So I think this is why we are doubling down on courses when everyone else seems to be pivoting. Because if you are in an industry where there are things constantly changing and constantly getting a better and improving and evolving even, of course, doesn't really make sense.

14:09Because that's a moment in time. And in my opinion, you're trying to get someone a base layer of education. And then they can have continued education from there on out. So what is this? This tells me one thing that making a course for home brewing is not a good idea. It does not make sense. Why? And this is just an example. And I think it's worth thinking about it in your own industry. And I say specifically a course like if you're selling it one off, I'm not talking in this instance. I'm not talking about communities or any sort of like if you are we're talking about non continued education, one and done pieces. I think if you were in an industry where things are constantly evolving, a single course is a hard sell.

15:16Because you want the continued education. Now you can have courses like fundamental workshops and courses within your product. So to get people like a general foundational layer, right, that normally wouldn't change like for example, if you had a course on how to use after effects, right. I would split that up into multiple courses because you could have a course just on motion graphic fundamentals where you're not even looking at. You're just talking about general concepts that exist in motion graphics, key framing, animation styles, things that are timeless. Those are courses that you could sell one and done, right. Because once you learn it, there's really no revisiting it. There's really no improving upon it. The technology doesn't really change. That's the core base. The way pools work, like the anatomy of a pool, that doesn't change.

16:20Cleaning a pool hasn't changed in 50 years. Chemistry hasn't really changed in 50 years. Like the shit that I'm teaching doesn't change. Now people in the industry that they argue, oh, it changes all the time. Like we still use chlorine, we still use chlorine. That hasn't no one has replaced it yet. They're like, we'll saltwater. I'm like, chlorine, that's chlorine. So, that's the reason I think I don't have a community. Well, I know it's why because there's just no continued education necessary. People don't actually want it. They want to solve their problem. They want to move on. And they want to solve it as quick as possible. The fact that we have subscribers on our YouTube channel still kind of blows my mind like, why would you subscribe to our channel? Doesn't make any sense. It's like, hey, my pool's green. Here's a video on how to solve it. I solved it. Great.

17:24I'm probably never going to watch another video. If I come up with a video later, that's like, here's how to get rid of black algae. You're like, well, I'm not going to watch that. I don't have black algae. So why would I watch that? I certainly wouldn't. So, right now, I'm only saying this because I want to get clearer on why we are investing in our courses when other people seem to be pivoting. We have a core group of educational products. And the course is an important part of that because it is our premium product. Our book is a premium product, but because it's a book, it will never be viewed that way. I think our app is a premium product. But of course, it's just an app. It will never be viewed that way.

18:29But of course, which right now is our weakest product will always be considered a premium product because of the way it's packaged. And I want the level of packaging to match what's actually the premium value of that. And that's why we're doing it. But the other reason is a business reason. So currently, we are getting a lot of sales on our book. And we are slowly growing our user base for our app, our paid app. But the problem that we're running into right now, the biggest constraint of our business right now, is really the amount of money that we can extract from a customer, from a single customer. Because we, this is such an interesting problem and I feel like it's very specific to pool care or just pools in general.

19:32So like, we could try to go down the road of creating a recurring product for pool owners. Well, what are things that pool owners currently buy over and over and over again? The answer to that is chemicals. And that's it. That's the, that is the answer. Because they don't buy equipment over and over again. Those are also one time purchases cleaning gear. Those are one time purchases. Right? When you think about, this is why I think eight sleep is so interesting because I don't, I don't agree with it. But it's interesting because they're like, how do we continually, how do we create a reoccurring product for sleep? Because everything involving sleep for the most part is a one time purchase.

20:34And so what they've done is created a mattress or, you know, a mattress cover and they added a subscription to it, which is in bonkers to me. Look, that is a one time product. But guess what? The mattress cover monitors your sleep habits and patterns and adjust the things as you sleep. And to get those features, you have to pay a subscription. It's kind of stupid to me. I'm like, I, it's the reason I don't have an eight sleep. I think an eight sleep will be awesome. But there is no world where I want to pay a subscription for a fucking mattress. I just don't. I don't need it that often. So to shoehorn, some sort of subscription into that and look, there are so many companies that are trying to figure out how to turn pool chemicals into a subscription. And it's so difficult because even pool chemicals that you have to buy over and over again, yes, but it varies.

21:42Sometimes you buy more than you need. Sometimes you don't need to buy as much. Sometimes, you know, because it's like, how much PhD crazier do you need every year? That depends on the weather. It really does. Right. There's a lot of factors. So you can't just like send somebody a bottle of PhD crazier every week. It wouldn't make sense. But you could send them chlorine every week because everyone needs chlorine. But again, it's still weather dependent. Whereas if you have a long care company, you sell a fertilizer. Yeah, you could put that on a subscription because all you have to do is educate them and say, hey, add this fertilizer every single week and keep your long green. And they're going to do it. But in pools, you can, but it's a hard sell. And also, most pools are seasonal. So like, same with lines. So you have to stop the service at some point. And that gets a little tricky. So our big problem is, and the other thing for that, the other problem there too is, yes, we could sell chemicals that are recurring, but we're, but we spent 20 years becoming this education company.

22:53And so now of a sudden, you're an education company telling me to use chemicals and they just, and you just so happen to be the company that sells it, that erodes trust. But if we started as a chemical company and added education on top of that, I think we'd be okay. I think we'd be in a better position. But vice versa, it kind of limits us. Now I could be wrong about that, but that's the general gut feeling I have. Like I would be suspicious of a company that spent all of this time trying to sell, trying to like not help me save money on chemicals, only to turn around and sell the chemicals themselves. That would, that would rub me the wrong way as a consumer. Now, I could, and this is where I have to admit to myself that this is just the case. I could turn our course into a subscription by adding a community element to it or just saying, hey, this is the Netflix for pull care, you just pay a monthly subscription to access this.

23:59But we're going to run into the same issue, which is okay, but my poll's not open all year round. And you know, you're not adding that much, you know, then I'm like constantly adding new content. There's all this other stuff. So the point is, is I think if I really just look at my audience and look at their needs, a book makes total sense because you buy it, you own it for life, the content inside doesn't really evolve, doesn't really change, mostly talks about the fundamentals. Yes, you have some updates here and there, but like, that's it, right? You're just helping people solve a problem. That makes sense. And a lot of our audience is older. And so computers are tougher for them. So having, you know, a book, it feels tangible. It's a good product. We were very late to come out with it, but once we did, it was like, okay, we unlocked a very simple thing to sell.

25:04Then the courses really worked. People wanted, people still want our courses. There aren't, yes, there are going to be a handful of people who say, well, how's it different from YouTube? I'm saying, the information is the same. It's just how it's packaged and delivered to you. Do you want us to sit there and watch all of our YouTube videos until the end of time to figure it all out? Or for 150 bucks, you watch this video, this section of videos once, you know, you have access to it for life. And you're, you never have this issue again. Well, that's that, okay, yeah, shortcut me there. That's, that's a huge thing. And then it's like, look, we will teach you, just like our book does, how to save money on chemicals. So literally just buying this product once will save you thousands of dollars for the rest of the time you own your pool, maybe even more than that. Like there's so much value that we can compress into a video course that it's insane.

26:10And the problem that this solves for us business wise is we have, we have an easy time selling our book. Our book makes sense. But our book, no one's going to, I doubt, I doubt this, but I could be wrong. I doubt anyone is sat there and read our book cover to cover. It doesn't make sense to do that. It's not written that way. It is a reference book. And so what we currently don't have in our repertoire is a, here is a step by step process on how to become a master of your pool. How to save money, how to understand how this all works, you can sit and take it once. And by the time you're done, you will not need help. You will just know what to do. And if you need help, you can either reference the course back if you're more video person or reference it in our book.

27:11You will understand how pools fundamentally work. And that's very powerful. And it will save you a ton of money. And I save you a ton of time as well. And we give very specific product recommendations. So those are things that we can include in the course to just make it better. But yes, you pay a premium for that because of how much it actually saves you. And when I say premium, like most people are like, yeah, a thousand books. But how many cores? I'm like, just no. Right now we need the, we need to increase the amount of money that we can make from a single customer. That's it. That is the biggest constraint we have in our business because right now we are selling a lot of books, but those people are staying with us. They buy our book and then they just kind of hang around.

28:12And it's like, that's fine. They're totally allowed to hang around. But I'm like, every other business has other things to sell. Once they acquire that customer, there's either they have a reoccurring product like a subscription of some kind or, or, you know, whatever, or they're selling them different things over and over again. So like, even if, you know, you run a mattress company, you sell that mattress once. Well, okay, turning it into a subscription isn't going to work for you because who wants to pay a subscription for a mattress? I know I don't. But you know what? I need a pillow. I need a comforter. I need a, I need new sheets. I need a heater. I need a, there's, there's so many sleeping, you know, I need a sleep mask. I need ear plugs. I need a spot for my dog.

29:13There's a lot of extra products that you can sell around a mattress. And these companies make their money, make their margins on those things. So in the case of like, for example, this would be, you know, this is a retail example that came to mind, which kind of doesn't make sense, but it's sort of like around Black Friday when Walmart sells TV. They have like a crazy, crazy deal on flat screen TVs, right? Well, okay, they're losing money on the TV. But once you're in there, you need an HDMI cable, you need a DVD player, you want a video game system, you want a sound bar, you want a TV stand, and that's where they make all their actual margin. Now, in our case, our main product has margin in it, and that's good. But we can't run Facebook ads that because we will lose all of our margin.

30:20So all of our marketing right now is organic because we don't technically pay for that. And so in order for us to survive, we have to consistently make content, which does cost us money. And that's where that profit goes. It goes into paying me and the team to make that content to promote that product. And the problem is is that we are constantly getting new customers because people are not buying a book every month or a book every year even. Yeah, sure they may buy more than one book, but not enough to warrant, you know, a crazy ad spend. Because I think a lot of companies will spend the money to acquire a single customer, only to know that that customer to them is worth, let's say, $300, but they only spent 50 or $100 to acquire that customer. Well, that's a lot of margin. That's a lot of profit.

31:25A customer to us is really only worth 30 bucks. So we can't spend more than $30 to acquire a customer. And guess what? It usually costs more than that or about that. And so we've been breaking even on those customers. But if we had a higher price product that I understand, not everyone will want to take us up. Only some people want the accoutrements of what they just bought. Well, that increases the overall value of a customer, even if only 30% of your customers actually take you up on that offer. And this is where I think recurring models are very attractive because you can essentially sell something very cheap, something that's high value for very cheap. And you just collect that money, the value of that customer grows over time. So if you think about Netflix, for example, like think how crazy it is that, and we'll just take one customer at a time.

32:34That customer, like you spent all this effort to get that customer and all they had to do was pay 12 bucks and they have a month's worth of your service, right? Okay. That's not your losing money on that month. You absolutely, you know, but the longer you keep them on your service, that number just keeps going up. And so the value of a customer gets so big, but you really only sold them one product. But that value just keeps growing. And then you invest in tactics and ways and things to keep them and keep that number growing. That's attractive because the thing you're selling is ultimately super high value, $12 a month, and I get five seasons of stranger things like that's incredibly cheap, right?

33:34Not to mention all of the other shows and video games and movies, you're like, that's so cheap, but it just keeps getting bigger. And I think certain certain things it makes sense for. I don't think continued education and pools make sense for a recurring model. However, when I look at the pool industry and I look at who's making the most money here, chemical companies for sure, because they can sell one, they can take all this time to acquire one customer, which by the way, they're not even doing. The pool stores are doing this. And then your job is just keep them coming back to your store. That's it. You just keep making money off the same person over and over and over again. That's great. Or you could do it like, hey, do a subscription. We'll come out and take care of your pool over and over and over again, right? That's also great because you take all this time to acquire one customer and you just collect money from them every single month.

34:43Of course, you provided service, but it just keeps growing. The value keeps growing. And the better you are at retaining that customer, the more money that customers worth. In our case, we don't have that recurring model until our app came out. Now we do, but it's still pretty low value. Meaning, you know, we're not making $12 a month board making four, which is still pretty good. And our job in that particular product is to keep making the product better and keep adding more things to the product to keep the value high. And the higher the more we add to that product, the more valuable it becomes. It's like, wait, this only costs 12 bucks. That's insane for what you get on that first month. Now, of course, you probably can't consume all of that content in one month. I'm sure some people try, but it's like, and then they come out something new all the time. You're like, oh, my God, this is amazing. And you're just paying that for life. But you know what, it's not that bad.

35:55I think that that's the name of the game is like, whatever it is that you charge, the value of that product must be like the higher the difference in. The value versus price, the bigger that the wider that gap, like the more you win. That's pretty cool. It's like, okay, so this is why I think our course is suck because we are charging money for them. And people are paying the money. Yes. But I think it's exactly worth that price. I don't think it's worth any more than that price. So starting the beginning of 2026, we have been completely rebuilding our courses from scratch. And we are adding new things to the course every single week until it will until it's built. But I think even when it's built,

37:04we are going to constantly and consistently add to it perhaps maybe on a monthly basis or a quarterly basis to keep increasing the value of the course, but keeping the price the same because I want to widen that gap. And the same is true for our app, right? The same as it's like, right now, I think our app is perhaps exactly worth the price of admission. It's like, okay, that you're trading, it's an even trade. But the more content and the more features and the more tools and the more things that we can do automatically for you in ways that we can save you money and all these other pieces of value that we can stuff into this app without changing the price. Just over time, it's just going to keep getting wider and wider and it's just going to get easier and easier to sell. And of course, at some point, you could, you know, if the value becomes such a wide gap, then you have room to play with price.

38:12So you could say, okay, we've added, this course is fucking massive. And right now, I think our course is like 30 lessons, 30 video lessons. So our goal is to basically restructure the course. I mean, I even be that many lessons, but we're going to keep adding to it. And we're going to say, look, at one point, like you're getting probably like $1,000 worth in value. But we're only charging you $149. So you know what? We're raising the price to $199, which is not a big price jump. The gap is still super wide. But now we can start to do that because what you get is so ridiculously good, right? And the same is true with the app. We could say, there's, and there's so many ways you could do this, but you could do. All right, the price for the app is $49 a year, you get all this shit. So we might be able to say, okay, here's what we're going to do.

39:15We're going to peel off some of our best features, like core features, and make a freemium version. So that way we can onboard a lot more customers and upsell them to the big, big app. We could afford to do that. Or we create tiers where we peel off. You know, it's like we have so much so many features in this app that we should probably create it in a tiered because like if you, if you need more than one pool or you need this specific tool, like then you pay more for that. And then you can start making more profit on your current thing. That's really good. And so the thing with the course, and I think it's going to be a big deal for us in 2026. We right currently we're so embarrassed by the course. And really we have nothing to really be embarrassed about. It's just more of a personal thing, but we don't promote it.

40:16We don't talk about it in our emails. We don't talk about it on our website, really. We don't talk about it in our content, our videos. We just don't mention it. The only place we really mention it, we mentioned it kind of once is when you buy our book, we say, hey, you might like the course as well. But our sales page is kind of weak because the content is weak. We believe. So we're spending the first half of the year really beefing up this course so that we can kind of brag about it. And really start to brag about it in a big way so that we can increase our big number that we're trying to increase this year is the LTV of our customer. Right now the LTV is static because we have one product and that's it. But if we can increase that meaningfully, then we're making more money off the same amount of effort that we're putting out, which is just increasing our profit by providing more value.

41:32That was a really long-winded, probably a bunch of nonsense. But yeah, our course sucks. But guess what? We're still working on them. We're still trying to make them better. And the thing I'll leave you with is, if you're still listening this far, if you currently sell a course, think about all the things I said at the beginning of this episode about, is your business right for courses? Does it make sense for courses? Maybe it's better fit into a community? Where it's like workshops and courses and think more of a Netflix for courses. Not saying courses are dead, but we sell on one off. Perhaps you'd be better off with a community, which I envy that because I wish we could do that. Honestly, I'd really do. That would be so sweet. And I'm sure we could certainly offer it, and I'm sure some people would buy it, but is it really right for our customers? I don't think it is.

42:34It's definitely worth an A.B. test though, I guess. I guess anything is. So let me know what you think. Shoot me an email, mad at moneylab.co. See you next time.