What are your thoughts on say something like a video course? i.e giving it away for free and doing an upsell on consulting or stick to charging for the course?
That's the twitter/blog model for a lot of people. They give away really great content, build their brand, and then hold conferences/sell t-shirts, etc...
The only challenge with that is you have to be really skilled/gifted to get traction in a very noisy environment.
The other challenge with something like "consulting" - is that you don't get a lot of opportunity to scale - you are limited by the number of hours a day you can work (as opposed to conferences, where you are limited to the size of the venues you can book/fill)
>The other challenge with something like "consulting" - is that you don't get a lot of opportunity to scale - you are limited by the number of hours a day you can work (as opposed to conferences, where you are limited to the size of the venues you can book/fill)
Ideally, you do both. One fills in the gaps for the other depending on the cycle of product/service you are in.
I did what you outlined in the first paragraph in a niche market. I have huge foothold, though it took me 4-5 years to get here, and there's a lot of upward mobility to still be had.
I travel a lot during the fall/winter for conferences and large group projects, and do a lot of consulting during the spring/summer. That tends to be how my industry cycles.
IMO, you want to have a broad service offering behind a veil of a major product. For example: Giving talks and conferences is my main product, fueled by a book/DVD set. Profit margins are highest there and scale well. However, this just doesn't work for certain segments of the population, so doing high-priced consulting to pay the light bills is always good - or my current strategy: Doing consulting for a discounted rate while taping the conference for later use in products.
Yes, the brand value approach I understand. Thing is, I don't really want to upsell to events and I agree regards consulting not being scalable, but i have a dilemma regards pricing for my course.
You know best - but don't overlook the possibility of in-person training for groups. It's halfway between an event and a training course.
I just spent a couple weeks with 7 other people learning about Cisco Routers from a single instructor - Total cost was $7300 each - so, $50K for a two-week class.
There's really good money in in-person class training.
The kicker is that this plays really really well with established companies. Pretend you're hypothetically a Cisco Routers consultancy. Parachuting into a random company and solving their Cisco Routers problems requires a very experienced consultant, both in terms of technical mastery and in terms of soft skills like interfacing well with clients' technical staff, dealing with political problems where you have imperfect background of who the key players/concerns are, and generic client relations.
Presenting about Cisco Routers (after the presentation has been substantially pre-written) and talking about them intelligently in response to audience questions requires a more limited, and far less expensive, skill-set.
This allows operating consultancies to do training offerings using more junior staff than they use for their consulting offerings, but to sell them at rates and quantities pegged to their consulting reputation rather than at the rate/quantity suggested by the person who will be tasked with delivery. And customers will often be quite thrilled, because training existing employees is often far, far cheaper than hiring pre-existing experts on the open market.
(There exist many other ways to do it. Pure-play training companies exist, for example, and there are companies which focus on synchronous online training, asynchronous online training, hybridized models, etc etc.)
Yes, just went on the similar thing for Elasticsearch - and a number of my colleagues did the same. It was around $800/day, and the class was about 20 people - so there's definitely some money in it.
Totally doable. People are very willing to pay for personal training as a supplement to a video course. I've done this before, except I also charged (much less) for the non-hands-on part, but the far more expensive 2 hours of one on one training sold out first.
Another interesting example in this area is Michael Hartl with http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ which is now perhaps the most popular Rails tutorial out there. You can read it all online for free but he makes very good money selling the PDF and screencasts of it.
Hmm. My course is on Udemy (i didn't want to create my own platform). I've got over 1.5hrs of video content, worksheets, examples, quizzes and live workshops. I'm struggling to quantify the right amount to charge for it.
