How doubling the price of his course increased sign-ups (and other lessons from 7 launches) with Justin Moore

Justin Moore is a passionate sponsorship coach and the founder of Creator Wizard, a school and community that teaches you how to find and negotiate your dream brand deals so that you stop leaving thousands on the table. In today's episode, Justin and I revisit his launching journey and share his pro tips on pitching for partnerships to grow your enrolments.

In this episode we chat about:
– Testing the waters—starting out and the valuable lessons Justin learned from his first launch which wasn't as successful as he'd hoped.
– Why bouncing back and identifying the variables for your next launch can have such positive benefits
– Understanding the impact of your course beyond the number of participants. Low sign-ups doesn't always mean failure!
– Embracing your aspirational growth and the surprising benefits of increasing your price point
– When inaction can be a curse – start somewhere and believe that the best path will identify itself
– Justin's powerful R.O.P.E pitching method

You can find Justin at https://www.instagram.com/creatorwizard/ and sign up to his newsletter at https://creatorwizard.com/join or check out his courses at https://creatorwizard.com

 

Today, I am chatting with a friend of mine, Justin Moore, who is a sponsorships coach and the founder of Creator Wizard, where he helps to find and negotiate brand partnerships. Now the thing that we're talking about, isn't brand partnerships. However, we're talking about launches, we're really geeking out on the things that we have learned over the last couple of years of launches. 

And in particular, through Justin's experience launching the same course seven times from getting three students in that very first signup to now tripling the price and capping the number of enrollments so that it can fit more within the lifestyle that Justin is trying to create. He also ends the episode with an epic tip that I hadn't even thought about. For a better way to connect with brands and actually leverage those partnerships to drive more enrollments for your own courses or whatever else you are launching. So this is a fantastic chat.

 

Brand Deal Wizard launch

So let's talk about the first time that you launched the Brand Deal Wizard because I know that first beta launch you talked about how it didn't meet your expectations. So what did that look like? How did you launch it and what did that whole Launch look like? What did you do?

I listened to a gazillion podcasts and watched YouTube videos and I read blog posts. I was very much in this kind of paralysis by-analysis mode early on where I was just thinking, I want to make it really, really good. I want to come out with something really compelling.

I think it was an Amy Porterfield podcast episode where the topic was around, try doing one-on-one coaching first to prove out the methodology. And so that's what I did. I basically shoved my imposter syndrome back into like the little corner where back in my brain and I just made a post on Instagram.

I said I've got two more spots for private coaching for the month. And I didn't know anyway if anyone was going to message me or comment or whatever. And sure enough, I had been pumping out content for a while, repurposing my YouTube videos and making posts on Instagram, and so on.

So I got people in my DMs and sure enough, that's how I got my first coaching client. And so they said, okay, what does it look like? And I made it up. I literally made it up. It's going to be a six-week program. Here's what we're going to talk about each of the six weeks. And I got on a sales call and just asked questions and they signed up on the spot. And so it was $1500 that I had quoted for the six weeks. And went through my methodology or whatever and got immediate results. And so, I did one-on-one coaching multiple times. And then once I had done that enough times and I had gotten the results for those people and they had gotten an almost immediate return on the $1500, right?

Because the nice thing is that with creators, they could get a deal immediately, that just makes it a positive return for them working with me, right? And so they're able to apply the things that I'm teaching them very quickly, at least for creators who have a pretty good deal flow already.

And so I did enough of those 1-on-1's that I was like, okay, the methodology works. Clearly I've done this several times now I think this is going to work. And so with the first beta, I did so much work, I hired a consultant to help me with the copywriting strategy. I worked on the slides really hard. And so the biggest change that I made from cohort one to cohort two was I shaved off an entire week of the course and then knowing that, okay, maybe I'll spin this off into its own kind of evergreen program, just this first week, maybe kind of like a lower ticket, entry-level offer.

And then I took that, the fifth week, and just kind of condensed it into the other weeks. And so I made it from a six-week course into a four-week course, and I decreased the investment from 1500 to between cohorts one and two. And so my thought was it's just like I made it up, right? But it was like, okay, $250 per session sounds good. That's what I did. 

 

How did you navigate through all of that? 

I have my wife and the amazing part is being able to pursue this part of my new business where I'm coaching and doing that kind of thing.

I very much looked at it as kind of like a skunkworks all along because I had my wife and I are doing just fine. With our creator stuff, we have other lots of other revenue streams and so whereas someone who was banking on this course launch being their sole source of income, I could see how that would be very demoralising.

And it was just like, I got to stop doing this. It's clearly not working and so got to go try something else. And so I very much had admitted that I had the luxury to be like, okay, yeah, it didn't go so well now. But I have the time and the resources to slowly try to iterate this and make it better.

 

What happened next after the beta

I launched it pretty quickly. I think I mistakenly thought that because I've had these situations where I would get invited to do a private talk to someone's private community or to their membership program or I knew I was going to be on a big podcast or something and so I was thought, I would try and time the launch to tie in with those things, thinking everyone's going to hear it and then I'll get all these enrollments and sales.

But it's like you have to treat your content strategy more just kind of in an evergreen perspective. The trust factor is going to be the biggest thing that's going to help people eventually enrol. So I tried to do that. I tried to play games.

And that was not the thing that I should have been. I shouldn't be chasing that carrot or whatever. So the trajectory in my course enrollments was as follows. I had three paying creators in my beta. Then the second one, five. 

Going from seven to 16, that's a positive direction. And I can credit one of the leaders of this mastermind. That was the most amount of money I've ever dropped down. But they basically told me when I was talking to them about it, to take your course to the next level. They told me during the sales qualification process that we are very confident that we can get you at least 10 incremental course enrollments over the next year.

It was a year-long program, and I was like, that's a good sales pitch. And so I was said, sure, why not? Let's try it. And so I paid $10,000 for that mastermind. And one thing, one throwaway comment that Robbie made to me during one of the sessions was, what percentage of your enrollments was full pay versus install? And I said a hundred per cent was full pay. 

He says, doubles the price of the course. Next cohort. He says it's too cheap. Yeah. If no one is choosing a payment plan, what the heck are you doing? And so I literally doubled the price of the course next time to 2000. And I went from 16 to 42. 

I think there were a lot of dynamics in the play. It was this perfect storm. There was a bunch of social proof that started happening. A lot of people getting results. I doubled the cost of the investment in the course, and so I think there were a lot of people who were a little bit more advanced.

Because one of the things that I teach in all of my course collateral is that you don't do discounts. You are worth it. You are valuable. And so this is one of the core things that I teach. I need to be in alignment with the language of the things that I'm teaching.

 

What are the types of folks that you want to have in the community? 

My profile, my persona was, I want to attract people who are investing in their creator business. Those are the folks who’s either already making a significant income working with brands, and they really want to understand how to do that better. 

Those are the folks who I want to attract. And by the way, I didn't mention this, that was also one of the reasons why I started the course even in the beta at $1500. Because, I said to myself, I want to create, and make this course aspirational. I knew that I had a much larger segment of my audience who was beginners, who were just starting out as creators, who are getting free products, and so on.

But I was like, you know what? First, I want to really serve this kind of intermediate to advanced audience because I know that I can knock it out of the park for them, and I'm going to serve that other segment of my audience but I need to ensure that I didn't want to make some sort of arbitrary threshold, like, you have to have 10,000 followers to join this or it's stupid, right?

And so what I did was I said, okay, I'm going to self-select in two ways by price, right? $1500 are going to self-select. And as well as I also said, you have to have done at least one paid partnership. That was why I put that on the sales page. I think that it's just like an important lesson for anyone listening that it's okay to really make your program aspirational in the beginning.

And you may be excluding customers that may have been willing to pay you. But you know, now they know that there's something that they may have to look forward to down the line. And I think with something, a program like yours or like a program like mine, there's so much work involved.

It's a big commitment. And for somebody who's paying $1,500, they've now got a lot more skin in the game than somebody who's paying $200. They're going to show up seriously, but they're going to take action. They're going to get those results. And you might have fewer people in the cohort at $1500 than you would at $150.

So, the trajectory of my course is after the 42 students, it was 58, right? And I was sitting here looking at this like, you know, it was really exciting.

I was thinking, okay, 58 to do that course. I have a small team. It's me, I have a community manager, and a VA and that's it, right? And my courses are intense. They're like the live sessions over Zoom, we have office hours, and there's like a private community in a circle.

It's a lot. It was heavy lift and my cup was empty. I was running on fumes at the end of that last cohort. And I was thinking, if I get a hundred people in this next cohort, I don't know what I'm going to do. I have to hire someone, I got to do something because I can't do it all.

I'm just going to go crazy. And so I thought to myself, do I want a business or a company where I have a bunch of employees and I have 200-person cohorts or three, and I thought to myself, no, I don't want that actually. I've done that in a previous life with my agency and it was extremely stressful.

So I decided, you know what? I'm going to increase it to 3000, and I'm going to cap the enrollment. So I capped the enrollment at 50 and I increased the investment to 3000 for this most recent cohort. And enrollment went down. As I knew it was going to happen and it was so much more manageable.

The vibe was different, obviously. It was like weren't 58 people? That's a lot, with 58 people, Zoom is on fire. It's great. I love the energy. And so then this recent cohort, it wasn't quite that, so I was missing that element, but it was like I was able to devote more time to people, you know, during Q&A during office hours.

But I made that decision and I was able to make still significant revenue with less people. And so I do think it's okay to make those business decisions sometimes. And so even though, it may feel as though you're kind of pumping the brakes on something that may be going really well, it's okay to make those tough decisions. And I think there's so much revenue, more sales, more people. 

So talking about life design, now I'm starting to just kind of put all the pieces in place to really develop a very sustainable way to serve my community. And, I said, I can do this. I could see it's small, right? I've only got one person doing it now, right?

 

Your powerful R.O.P.E pitching method

I do talk a little bit about reaching out to other brands that have a similar audience but aren't your direct competitors and partnering with them. If you are marketing manager X at some random SaaS company or something that would serve course creators or whatever, right?

Like Kajabi for example. Because that's all they talk about all day long is, new features and benefits and new community etc. Office hours, right? That's all they talk about.

And people just start to tune that out, right? Because it's not that interesting. Right? And so imagine you go to Kajabi and you say, Hey, I would love to do a webinar for your customers. Doing a presale or doing a how-to launch an evergreen course or how to do paid ads etc.

How to, whatever you pick a topic. Right? And you want to get real tactical here. Should we do this? So I'm going to pull up Kajabi's Instagram handle right now. Because we're going to do some research. I have a methodology, a pitching methodology that I teach in my course called the Rope Method.

And the rope method stands for R is your pitch has to be relevant to a campaign that Kajabi has either ran in the past or is currently running. Okay? O stands for organic, meaning that you can tie your pitch back to organic content that you've already published. P stands for proof. You can show Kajabi how you have helped other brands achieve. And E is easy to execute when Kajabi says, sounds good, let's do this. 

Okay. And so what this looks like is, let's pull up Instagram here because a lot of people be like, oh, well I'm not even on Instagram. I'm not a social media creator. I don't care. Instagram is a research tool. And so what I'm going to do is I am going to scroll back because probably every company did this in our space. Everyone was like posting something about the season which is Black Friday, right? And so what you can do is scroll back, let's say to Kajabi's Instagram last November. Around this time, and you see, so imagine you're trying to pitch them for this, right? You scroll back and this is your pitch to them. 

You say, Hey, I noticed that last Black Friday you were running this campaign where you were offering whatever it was, three months of a professional tier, or some sort of promotion. Are you going to be running that promotion again? 

Oh, I would love to help you spread the word about this in the following ways. I can do a promotion to my newsletter. I can do a promotion to my students in my course or my community. I can run a webinar with you that you can run during the Black Friday period, we do some sort of tactic, and then at the end, we give them the offer.

So it's like they knew they ran that campaign, right? I'm just doing this because it's relevant to them, but it could be any campaign that this brand was running, right?

There you go, you're going to help them in this way. Another example is you get an expert from their marketing team to come in and do a guest session in your course or your community, and you make them pay for that.

Don't let them do that for free. They have to pay you for that privilege. Remember, your course or your community is filled with its ideal customers. They have to pay you for that. 

 

Your imperfect action 

I think honestly it was starting my email list, candidly, that was very much a leap of faith into something that I've never done before. But I knew based on all my sleuthing and podcast listening and reading that I got to have an email list, I got to have a newsletter, right?

And so I made literally every mistake in the book that you can imagine when I first like launched my email list, I made all the lead magnets that I thought you needed and the PDFs and the checklists because I thought that's what you needed to get people to sign up for your newsletter.

And it actually took me a while before I realised that this is a great segue to do shameless self-promotion for my newsletter of course. So can I just tell a very quick story because I think this is actually fascinating, which is that I have unfilled a story?

I really struggled to figure out what my newsletter should be about. I was like, oh, it's going to be tips on being a coach because when I started, I was not a sponsorship coach. I was teaching you the business of being a creator. That was my tagline, right? And so I talked about all those different things, diversifying email lists, physical products, all this stuff, right?

And it was a couple of people subscribing every day. It was fine, right? But it wasn't like traction at all. And so one day as I mentioned, my wife and I have been just doing this for so long and I also have run the agency for so long that I just see so much deal flow and a lot like just inbound inquiries.

Work with this brand, or apply here etc. And the vast majority is just deleted because it's either below a threshold that we just would not do anymore in just terms of how much they were offering or whatever, or it's just not a good fit.

And so one day I thought, what if I just take these application links and put it in my newsletter, $200, $300, $500 is meaningful to a lot of people, right? And so I literally, one day I just had this like little section in my newsletter, like brand deals you can apply to, and I got all these people responding.

What is this? Is this real? Are these actual deals that I can apply to? And so people just went nuts. They like couldn't believe it was a free newsletter. They were getting paid sponsorship opportunities. And so when I did that for a few times and I was just like, there's something here.

I just took a hard pivot. I literally got rid of all my lead magnets. I was like, no. You sign up for my newsletter, I'm going to send you paid brand deals. And so you go to my landing page for my newsletter.

It just says it's like a testimonial. “I have made $17,000 from Justin's newsletter from brand deals that I've gotten through Justin's newsletter,” “800,000 TikTok subscribe followers,” etc. And it was literally it. Name, email, and then the button sends me sponsorships. 

I would not have had that insight had I not just gotten started. Sometimes you're not going to figure out what it is, what really is kind of the catching the tiger by the tail until you try some stuff, you throw some stuff against the wall and see what people are interested in.

And it's been the same way for my course. I've changed so much about the actual collateral that I teach from cohort one to cohort seven. Still, I could do a whole podcast episode on everything that I've changed about how I teach the course because I just love geeking out on this topic and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. 

 

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