Receive money to create your product. That is the ideal and I will walk you through how to do it: first you will sell the coaching, then you will create the lessons based on the needs of the people in the program.
This is how I have always created my coaching programs. I have launched multiple coaching programs in the last few years and never, ever did I create the lessons first.
Now please don’t get me wrong, I know what the coaching program will be about. I may have written 8 or 10 points that I plan to teach people. However, I don’t write the lessons until people enter the training program.
Your clients know what they need
There are two reasons for that. The first reason is that you really don’t know what people need until they sign up. So let’s say you know you are going to teach on these 8 topics, but you don’t know what people really need. Do they need a lot of theme 1 or a little bit of theme 2? Do they need a lot of each, what do people need?
As soon as they sign up, you can literally send an email that says “I’m putting the finishing touches on this training program and I want to know exactly what the top 3 things you want me to spend more time on.”
What I have found is that if I bring 10 people to a coaching program, they all come from the same sales page. They have all seen the same 8 to 10 points that I am going to talk about, they have all seen the same reasons I gave them for signing up. Almost everyone gives me the same top 3. I mean, they may not be exactly the same, they may use different words. A person can have 2 that are the same as everyone else, and they have 1 weirdo. A person has 1 weirdo, then 2 of the same. But when you add them all up and you look at it, you see that these customers need this, this, this and this, and they need a lot. They don’t need so many other things.
Create your lessons after asking your clients
Then you start creating your lessons. Now remember that when you have a coaching program, it implies that you are going to receive timed material. Remember, with your products, they receive the learning materials in advance. It’s a product.
Online courses are very popular right now, and a lot of them are kind of a hybrid, because you get the training materials in advance, but then you have 6-8 weeks of extra homework, etc. So it’s like a hybrid.
However, when you go alone with training, you will get measured material. They will receive one lesson every week, one lesson every 10 days, two lessons a month. Whatever the case.
What that means is: customers sign up today and you ask them what’s most important to them. Then you have a full week or 10 days to create your first lesson and send it to those people. Now you can have some preliminary materials that you send to them; maybe while you’re creating your lesson you send them a daily email getting them started. But when they enroll in a coaching program, they know that they are not getting everything up front. So then you create that first lesson.
Then while they are doing the first lesson, they may have questions and you start answering the questions in the second lesson and add more material. If the lessons come out every 2 weeks, well, you can literally have 2 weeks to create each lesson. Now what you could do, if you really wanted to, is create the first lesson right when you sell it. So they don’t have to wait for the first lesson, that’s fine too. You can create that first lesson.
Why you should sell before creating
I told you there were 2 reasons to sell first and create second. # 1 is that you don’t really know what they need in the coaching program until they sign up.
The second reason is, and I’ve seen it over and over again, is that if you wait to launch your coaching program until you have written all 10 lessons, you may never start your coaching program!
Why? Because you will probably never really know what to put in your 10 lessons. It’s like this Catch-22: write the first lesson, write the second. So you don’t know what to put in the third one, so now you don’t start your coaching program.
It is much better to launch, get 10 people to pay you, and if you have 10 people who have already paid you, have already paid you, now you have the obligation to create these lessons. And now you will.
I found that when you have an obligation to do something, you generally tend to do it more than if you just hope you can release it in the future. Plus, you get paid faster if you sell it and then create it later. Now, in the future, you can resell that exact same training program, without creating new lessons, because you have now created those lessons once, based on information from the first 10 people who participated. Future people who join will get the same lessons that you initially created, however you will continue to improve on those lessons as people continue to ask questions. Go ahead and sell your program now and follow these steps to create the lessons: Your customers will appreciate the customized program and you will have the motivation you need to create the product.