Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I’m going to talk about why I decided to sunset my niche site courses and some of the things that I learned along the way. I was surprised by the reaction of some of the students and what I did to, you know, address any concerns that people had.
There were a couple of interesting folks out there as well that had. Well, I’ll, I’ll tell you about it in a second here. Also, I’ll just tell you some random stuff too. So this is completely random. And I notice it as I’m looking at my, my video over the last six months or so. The lights that are in the very background of my basement here.
So there it’s in the back of the scene. If you’re just listening, it’s, it’s way back. It’s probably 15, 20 feet back there. Okay. Something like that. It’s pretty far back. So I had Christmas lights that, that I just kept up all, all year long to provide some depth because, uh, it’s dark, it’s dark all around me.
I’m lit pretty well, but the lights just provide some depth and something interesting in the background. So anyway slowly over time. They started burning out. So I had maybe like four strands across the whole background here. And I think I’m down to one. So I’m going to have to replenish those and maybe get something that will last a little longer.
They’re led lights. So they really should last a long time, but I don’t know. I thought they were supposed to last like 10 plus years or something like that. But anyway, that’s completely random and off topic, but. Back on topic. I had a niche site course spanning from, I think it was like 20 really like 2015 or so up until recently.
And I, I rebooted it and I changed things and I updated over time and rebranded. When. So it’s something you have to do with online courses, but basically in the last two years or so, the industry shifted a lot in it shifted a lot in the last 12 months or so with AI. Chat, uh, bots, not chat bots, but with AI and chat GPT, that’s what I’m looking for.
With chat. GPT, things changed quite a lot, so there was content production via ai and I didn’t really want to do that, so I decided I don’t know where the industry is going. I know that I have a feeling that. Scaled AI content production is not going to work in the long term. And it did work for about a year or so.
And then I think Google cracked down on not all, but a lot of the very obvious scaled AI websites and that whole business model. So fortunately for me, I actually didn’t try to. Update the course with AI content production at scale. So I decided I’m not going to do that. I don’t think it’s going to be a long term solution and I don’t have a lot of experience with it anyway, nor does anyone else.
And I was like, I don’t want to learn new things that are going to change really quick. And then even worse, I don’t want to try to teach other people to do the thing. That’s probably not going to work for very long. And I didn’t add anything. I was like, Things, things in the course still work a little bit slower and there’s more volatility.
So a little over a year ago, I decided I’m not going to continue promoting multi profit site. That’s the name of the course of multi profit site. I was like, I’m not, I’m not going to sell it anymore. I’ll continue to support the students, but at this point I’m not going to sell it anymore. That was over a year ago.
Other course creators did the best that they could do. And they added some things to address AI. They tried to update things and, and just keep up to date overall. So at this point, over a year later, I was like, okay, no new students have gone through the course. The overall participation by students is relatively low for online courses.
Like people will. Often get started, but very few people go all the way through. And part of it is maybe their interest change. A lot of it is probably like time limitations and they just don’t have the extra time to go through the course material. They don’t have extra time to implement it. So they have the material, but they’re just not using it.
It’s similar to like how people buy books and then they don’t read them. They put them on the shelf and they have a book. I actually have a handful of books that I like bought and I have not read them yet. There’s probably like four. I read a lot, so I should be able to get around to them, but. The point is people will get the information and they don’t necessarily go through it.
They don’t read the book. They don’t go through the course. Maybe they don’t implement this stuff in there either. So that’s the reality of it. As I was looking at my business and my expenses, I had. The course platform renewing soon. So I knew that that was coming up in September. I knew this for like the last nine months or longer.
I knew when it was going to renew and it’s not cheap. So course software can be relatively inexpensive. However, if you had. Sort of a mature course, online course business, and you have several courses and you have a full set of marketing funnels and all this stuff. Like I had at Kajabi, it’s fairly expensive.
So for me, I was on, I think the middle tier, which costs about 2, 000 per year. And that is a relatively large chunk of money, right? You pay annually. So it’s not like I have to pay that every month, but it’s 2, 000 for a year. And that bill was coming up. So the fact that I’m not selling the course anymore, it’s pretty expensive to keep a course alive for 2, 000 when you’re not bringing any more revenue.
Using that system. And as I looked at my overall business and what I want to be doing, I was like, I’m probably not going to be launching more courses. I don’t need all this sophistication that Kajabi has. While it’s a great platform, I decided to put it to sleep overall. So basically they call it a parked account and you just.
You keep it active as far as the information in there, but you can’t access anything. So I can’t send emails. I can’t see any of the content in there. I just have like billing information in there and that costs 30 per month that I will continue having to pay. And I’ll keep that up for a little while, just in case I need to get back to that content or information or anything.
Now. I knew I was going to need to inform the students. One thing with most online courses in the ones that I took, the way I set up my course, I said, Hey, you have lifetime access to the course. Now, what does that mean? Is it my lifetime? Is it your lifetime? Is it some other thing? And often in fact, I’ve never seen it defined.
However, the way I defined it unofficially in my head, I was like, I’m going to keep the course active while it’s still a valid business model. So really when I define it, I’m saying this is a lifetime access while the business model. Is valid. So I never officially said that I don’t think anywhere in any of my documentation or fine print or anything like that, it’s just in my head.
I was like, well, I’m not going to keep the fucking course going indefinitely forever for my whole lifetime. That doesn’t make sense. But. The thing that does make sense is to keep it active and give people access as long as it’s valid. As we have seen over the past year basically the business model with niche sites, content sites, authority sites, however you want to define it.
It’s completely changed. It’s extremely volatile when we saw the helpful content update in the fall of 2023 rollout. It hurt a bunch of sites, the March update in 2024, um, more sites, the August update, maybe helped a few, but mostly I would say it’s not the majority of the sites. When I rolled out. Five figure niche site back in 2015, 2016, when I had sort of the reboot and the rebranding over to multi profit site, it was sort of positioned as a side hustle that you could grow relatively quickly without putting any specific timelines, but relatively quickly and potentially do it full time.
I had students go through and featured many of them. On the podcast and on the YouTube channel that took their side hustle full time. They, you know, maybe they didn’t have any experience. They got moving. They started making progress and some people within a year or two were Doing it full time or they were making full time income in addition to their actual full time job.
So with all that said, I was like, okay, the industry has changed. It’s extremely volatile. It doesn’t really serve the students in the same way. So I was like, okay, I’m going to sunset the course, starting with not promoting it anymore. And eventually as we were rolling towards the renewal period, I am, uh, you know, I got to run the cashflow, right?
I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a business person. And I’m like, well, should I just burn 2, 000 for no reason here or take some action and do some things? So obviously I did some things while I was. I had access before I parked my account over at Kajabi. I sent an email out with fairly short notice, to be honest with you.
But I sent an email out and I said due to these reasons, which I just explained to you here, I’m going to sunset the course. And here’s the reasons why there are some alternatives out there. If you want to take a look, but it’s shutting down, you have I think I gave like 48 hours, which there was actually more, more time than that.
I said, Hey, you got 48 hours. You can go check it out. If you have any questions, if you have any concerns, let me know. And I sent that out. Here’s the part I was surprised about. I was shocked. But the number of people who still wanted to access, even though I said this material is mostly out of date, I would say 50 percent of it is out of date.
You can cherry pick the other 50 percent and you could probably get good value from it, but the context. Is all wrong. The framing is all wrong. And I would advise you to probably just move on and, you know, have a look at my peers. I promote some of the, some of my friends have courses in a similar space and they’re keeping it active.
I’m not, it’s not one of my high. Interest areas. So I was like, okay we’re going to sunset it. You have about 48 hours to hop in. You can take a look, let me know if you have any concerns. So I had a slight feeling that some people would want access. Now the good part, while the course platform is shut down, I mean, I still have all the content.
I have all the content from the original course in 2015. I have all the videos and all the updated videos from All the course material inside multi profit site. So I didn’t want to go to another, you know, learning management system that would probably cost, you know, a hundred plus dollars per month or so potentially less, but basically I was like, I don’t want to host it somewhere else.
So I kept it very simple and I wanted to. Just have an easy way for people to access it. It doesn’t need to be sexy. So basically I just put all the course material in Google drive and people had to request specifically. Now there could be some issues with. Controlling the files and who’s accessing it.
Like they’re potentially are bad players out there. But to be honest with you, they were always out there. And every, I don’t know, every few weeks, every month or so, I’ll see a notification in my email that someone is. Selling the course on one of these, I don’t know. It’s like a group by site slash people steal digital products and then have them accessible on a site, which I think, I mean, they’re all bullshit and there’s actually an industry around.
Trying to get those companies to take the content off of there. So there’s like lawyers out there that are like, Hey, we could help you get that content off. But it turns out, I don’t give a shit. This was something that happened like my very first course, way back in like 2013, 2014, people will take your stuff.
And you could try to fight them, but there’s a lot of hoops to jump through. And at the end of the day, those really aren’t customers, right? Like those people were never going to buy my course. They would join the bullshit theft websites where the group buys are. They would pay like 15 bucks or whatever, 50 bucks or whatever, whatever deal they’re trying to, um, get.
They would. They would pay that, but they would never buy like the actual course. And the thing is like, I’m not going to give them any support. That’s a big part of the, the arrangement of course online courses and working with me. If you have questions, I’ll be able to answer them. So anyway, a lot of people said, Hey, I want to have access to the course material.
And I was like, okay, like I do have a solution. So I said, Hey, in about a day or two, I’m going to have a solution out there. I put it on Google drive. I sent out the information and yeah, several dozen people. Requested access. So I gave them access and they could check it out again. There’s probably like 50 percent of the material is good and useful though.
The, the con text of how it could be applied is different. So that does make it maybe a little bit less valuable. So one, actually, before I go on to the surprising thing, I do want to give a plug my friends Cody and Julie. They have a course on E printables. So when, if you are looking for alternative side hustles, this is one that I’ve been talking about for a couple of years.
I haven’t actually dabbled with it myself, but it’s Etsy printables and Cody and Julie have been doing this for a few years, have found it to be extremely not only lucrative, but it’s fast to get started. So we’ll link up so that you could see a recent interview I did. I think it was a few months ago with Cody, but Cody Berman actually have hung out with him in person several times.
Typically I see him at conferences and, you know, we’ll hang out and have some drinks and just. So he is a friend of mine and it’s awesome course because it’s, it’s amazing how fast that you can get started. It’s one of these niches where it’s, um, or it’s, it’s one of the business models where you can niche down and kind of niche down to a seasonality type thing.
So when you’re thinking of the. The products that you might promote or you might create and promote, you can aim for like Halloween is coming up, you have Thanksgiving, you have Christmas and other holidays around December, and you can use those to sort of ride the wave and get that seasonality bump.
And that’s one of Cody’s strategies. They teach it directly in the course. There’s actually a I think it’s coming up in a day or two. There’s a workshop sort of a webinar type situation. So we’ll link up to that so that you can get to it. Definitely check it out. It’s one of the cool business models where you can get started on the side, but you could definitely grow it into something very large.
And you know, one of the reasons why. You know, whatever, working on Amazon or another place where there is a market active. If you’re selling stuff on Etsy, people are literally going there trying to find stuff to buy. You don’t head over to Etsy to find more information about a thing and you’re not actually a purchaser.
If you go to Etsy, you’re looking to buy stuff. So that’s one of the big advantages. Now back to the point of today, a couple of the students, when they got the first email, they. They felt bad. Right. All right. There was only really like one person that did this. Actually, there were two. One person was like, what a rip off.
And I was like, what do you want me to do with that? You bought the course like several years ago. I’m telling you that it’s sun setting for a specific reason. And so I, I, I’m, I try to do good with customer service. So I did say, Hey, if I gave you access to the video files and the other material, would that, would that be good?
And they said, yes. And I also asked, Hey, that’s great. But I have to ask you, why were you so rude when you replied back before? So they didn’t reply back to that. Of course, maybe they have something going on, but. Basically, I’m trying to do the right thing. And it’s a difficult decision that I had to make.
It’s not like I want to shut down the course, right? It’s just, Hey, this is not valid. Like if you follow this information, it’s going to be much different than what I explained in the course. It’s going to take longer. Google is not a good player. They’re not a good faith player in SEO. So. Anyway, I struggled with this.
That’s the point I’m trying to make. So the other person where we did have a little bit of back and forth, they said, Oh, wow, well, I hope you’re going to give us free access to some other course or something like you have to give us something. And I was like, well, you know, No, I, I don’t, I don’t have free access to another course.
I don’t really have an alternative for you. And then they, they came back again, they were really pushing. They just wanted something. They wanted something. They said, well, you know, really it’d be great if you could host maybe like every week or so just a question and answer session so the students can come and we can just ask you questions about what’s working these days.
Well, You know, the course was not set up as a community or a workshop where there’s weekly sessions. Anytime you have weekly sessions, Basically you are paying a sort of a monthly community fee. That’s why communities are very popular. Basically it’s a membership and you get ongoing value. And in return as the, you know, host, I get ongoing financial compensation for the time, right?
They’re like, this is all transactional. It’s the point I’m trying to make. So. At this point, I, I was like, Hey, I’m sorry. Like, you know, this, that is not sustainable. I can’t indefinitely just offer a free one on one time. And I was like, I do live streams on YouTube every week, but the person really wanted like the, the one on one or not, not necessarily one on one, but they wanted like something extra that wasn’t available to the public.
So those were the only two. So that’s great. Those were the only two outliers. And it’s interesting cause some, some people are a little timid to ask for stuff, but the individual who was like trying to negotiate with me, he was very aggressive to try to negotiate for something more. So it’s super interesting, just like the different levels of what people think they deserve.
And. There were an overwhelming number. So I came out with a negative things. Cause those are the more interesting things. Right. But basically the overwhelming dozens of people said, thanks very much. Like I understand why you’re shutting it down. It’s a little bit disappointing, but Hey, this has all been crazy.
Google’s a motherfucker. And. You know, this is disappointing. However, I support you in shutting it down. Overwhelming. That is what the messages were. When I sent the second email and said, Hey, if you want access, just go here, do this, and you’ll get access to it. So number one, it actually helps me keep like pretty solid control on it.
The other thing is like when, when I offered the access, I didn’t People were grateful for that. Again, the overwhelming majority of the folks, they wrote back a note and said, that’s amazing that you’re offering it up. I understand the limitations of the material in there. However, I’m glad that I get access to it because I really wanted to be able to see the hiring templates for hiring freelancers.
And the thing is the parts that are useful. They’re either around mindset or they’re around setting up systems and using templates. Maybe you’re not going to be hiring a lot of writers. So the information in the templates would change. However, you could follow the template and maybe hire people that are prompt engineers for AI and do that.
You hire those people instead of writers. So there are useful tidbits in there, but at this point, I was like, I’m not going to try to migrate this type of template into another thing and reframe it when, again, the course material doesn’t support or fit the context of. What we’re dealing with these days.
So that’s my overall story with this sun setting of the course. If I look back and I think, and if, if, if you asked me, which there’s probably not that many people that are like trying to figure out how to sunset a course specifically, but you might be in a position where you need to share bad news with your customers or clients or something like that, and you might I look, I look down on my corporate days.
Occasionally, you know, I talk, I talk bad about it, you know, but I did learn a handful of things and one is communicating bad news. So I’m not necessarily, I’m not like great at it, but I had to fire a handful of people and it’s awkward. You’re bringing bad news to them. So I typically just got to the point quickly and.
Did what I could offer support, but basically I just shared the news and as few words as possible, and then got the fuck out of the way, that is kind of what I was doing with this. I was probably a little verbose in the actual first email, just cause I wanted to provide enough context that said it was probably like one page or less if you were to like print it out, so not super long.
And it had the core information, hopefully not much more than that. And. What I potentially should have done or could have done, I could have provided a way immediately to give access to the course material that said, I didn’t actually want to do it because it’s out of date, right? Like that’s, that was the big message.
It is out of date. So I didn’t really want to spell out that option. Like, Hey, do you want, do you want to get access to the files? So I kind of intentionally did it, even though it ruffled a few feathers, but I did leave the communication channel open and, and ask people like, Hey, if you have any concerns, please let me know.
And then I was able to address it. So I could have offered the alternative access right off the bat. However. I think it was good for me to not do it so that I could find out if people really did want access to it or not. So. It’s one of those things that I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have done it any other way unless I wanted to try to give that access, but I didn’t want to give the access.
So that’s why I did it that way. But that would have been one alternative. And if you are in a different situation where you can offer that up front, it’s a little bit proactive so that that is good. And
the other interesting part, which. I don’t think this is too judgy on my part, but if I have to say it, maybe it is. I, I have to go ahead and tell you since I’ve, I’ve teased you just by, by saying that. I know that most people didn’t log in for the last couple months or several months. Some people didn’t log in for over a year.
But when I said, Hey, I’m going to close access. They thought, Oh no, this, this is a bad, I really want to be able to go back in there. And the thing is, I don’t know if they’re going to go back in there. So by me sending out the first email, it made them remember that they, they valued the course material.
And this is one of the reasons why I think online courses are actually good. Cause. You know, some people will say, Hey, why don’t you just offer all that material for free on YouTube? Or some people do have almost all their material for free on YouTube, but they still have a course and people still pay for the course part of the value for the student in paying for a course is they value the material and there’s a sunk cost associated with it.
So for me, I actually, I’m a, I’m a pretty good student. So when I’ve paid for a course. I went through everything. I went through stuff that I already knew just in case there’s something that I didn’t pick up in the past, but I am a good student. And if I’m paying like thousands of dollars for a course, I will go through all of it.
I will go through every single little bit of it and I’ll do all the exercises because it’s a good chunk of money and I have a sunk cost not fallacy. I’m using the sunk cost to my advantage. So the point is. I think because people paid money for it in the past, even if they weren’t actively using it, when they were reminded that they had access and that access will be going away, they thought, Oh, wow, I really need to get back into it.
And I was, I mean, again, I respect that. And that’s part of why courses work. So hopefully some people were like, I. I was busy for a little while, but I want to actually use the course. I, I, I was going to start using it next week. Like some people said, Hey, I was going to start on the course in a couple of days and I, I’m thinking, ah, is that for real?
Like you, you had access for like over a year. You never logged in. Like why, why now? And of course, maybe. Maybe I’m reading into it too much. And again, maybe I am too judgy, but maybe I reminded them that they were going to get started and they were like, Oh, I do actually want to get started. So I don’t know.
That’s, that’s a lot of editorializing on my part. And the point here is there’s value in courses because if someone pays for it, they value it more than like free information that they get very specifically. I know that I have gone and had coffee with someone so they could pick my brain, which is like horrible thing.
Don’t ask someone to pick their brain. Not cool. Usually you have to do it a different way, trick them into going on a hike and then you could bring it up on the side or whatever, but it turns out I could buy my own coffee, little tip.
And I completely forgot what I was going to say. Hold on, I’ll think of it. Oh, right. Funny thing. I had to stop for like two minutes and try and remember what I was going to say. But basically I know people don’t value free information because I have been in long conversations where people ask me a million questions.
I told them. What I believe to be great answers. And then they went off and didn’t do anything that I advised them to do. They came back asking for more help and they said, no, I didn’t follow any of your previous advice. I saw some random dude on Tik TOK and they said to do this other thing. So that’s what I did.
So. It ends up wasting my time. And then I, obviously I don’t help them again because they just ignore what I say and I don’t need their coffee. Like I said, I could buy my own coffee. Although I do love coffee, do love coffee. I like beer too. Beer’s really good. But, but anyway, people don’t value free information, but.
If they pay you like 300 for you to go through and tell them the answers to questions, then they will probably listen to it because they at least have some dollar amount assigned to exactly what they got in that information. So anyway, it’s, it’s, If you’re just getting started, I imagine myself back in 2013, if I heard someone saying what I just said, I would maybe take it with a grain of salt and be like, you know, whatever, Doug, you’re trying to sell courses and blah, blah, blah.
But I mean, the thing is, like, how many free PDFs have you downloaded and not read them, right? I mean, no value if there’s, if there’s, if there’s no cost to getting it, then you are likely to not value that information. However, like I said, if I pay like 2, 000 for a course or 3, 000 or 4, 000, like I paid in the past, I will go through all the material.
I’ll go through every worksheet. I will show up for all the office hours, sessions, and I will ask questions. I’ll send questions ahead of time. I’ll use the support because a lot of times you just have support for like one year or so, which. That is what was in my course. I think I, it may have been like priority support for six months and then you get a year of support.
Anyway, the point is it was, it was a decision that I had to make and it was somewhat of a tough decision. I also had to inform people with some bad news and then deal with the repercussions and deal with the negotiations. So this was not one of the fun things you might have to do while you’re running your business, but.
But you have to do this kind of stuff, you know, frequently there’s ups and downs. And at this point, like I said, I had that decision to make, and there were a few cascading impacts along the way. And there were, you know, other like migrations, like I, I needed to. Move some content and some other things to other platforms.
So this was like a whole little project, a little migration where little things are going to go wrong and all that kind of thing. So that’s it for today. Relatively short episode. I would like to invite you to join me for live streams. So I have been doing live streams again on a regular basis weekly, even though I’ve had to change the day, just because I’ve been traveling and doing other non work related things typically during the week.
And in fact, I’m recording this over a weekend because I end up doing more stuff during the week, which is kind of weird, but yeah, with travel and other things going on and other. Other projects that are non work. Um, I’ve had to move the live stream time and day a handful of times, but. I’m trying to get guests more often than not and cover something that I don’t know anything about or get updates from, you know, folks that have been on the show.
So recently I had Shauna Newman on providing an update for her portfolio of sites and some side hustles and some other stuff she’s working on. Brooks Conkle was on really recently talking about local brands. He has like a newsletter podcast and website for his. And it is a great way to monetize a super unfair advantage that you have, right?
Like I couldn’t do well, not as well, right. I couldn’t do a local brand for a place that I don’t live. So if you want to, you know, get more involved in your community, it’s a great way to like work with local businesses. And again, you have an unfair advantage. So. Everyone lives somewhere. Your town might be a little too small, but I, I would guess like you probably live in a city or town large enough to support a local brand, but anyway, check out the live streams.
I do you know, record them, right? So it’s live and you could participate in the chat, but. It is, um, on YouTube. So you can go to YouTube, go to the little live section on my, on my channel page, and then you can see all the previous ones. So those are pretty fun. I like live streams. I mean, I started on YouTube doing live streams just cause editing was very time consuming.
And I was like, I’m going to do these live streams and see how it goes. And it’s been something that I really enjoy. Okay. I encourage people to, to try to do it themselves. It is a challenging and it is scary, but once you get over the initial hurdles, it’s a pretty fun thing to do. Very good skill to have.
So we’ll put a link for that. I’ll put a link for the ePrintables workshop and course so that you could check it out. It’s one of those, I think I could tell you this because you’re peeking behind the curtain anyway, especially in this episode. The workshop will be live this week. The course is open for enrollment this week.
So they, they do a literal launch. Here’s the behind the scenes thing. They, they do have an evergreen funnel, so you can actually enroll in the course and you’ll get an offer. You have to go through their sales funnel. But you can, so if you’re listening to this and it is not. Between September 23rd and September 30th.
It’s okay. You could follow the link and you should be able to sign up for the email list and or go to one of the workshops or webinars or get their free ebook, and then you’ll be able to purchase the course. So don’t tell anyone a lot of times though there could be not always, but there could be additional bonuses during the live launch.
So. That is one reason why, like, if you’re listening to this in the period between September 23rd and the 30th in 2024, then you probably want to check out the live webinar because a lot of times there’s like some pretty awesome bonuses that you get during the live webinar. So that’s it for today.
Have a great day out there. Thanks for checking out the show and we’ll catch you in the next episode.