Marketing and Launching my Snapchat 101 Course

Hello. Welcome to Daily(ish) for Wednesday, April 20. Let's just say it's nice outside. I'm recording this day before so I don't know what the temperature actually is so hot hopefully. But this is not a weather podcast so it doesn't really matter.

This is episode one sixty nine of daily(ish)goodstuff.fm/daily(ish)/169 is where you can find it on the Internet. It's brought to you by FeedPress, which you can visit at feed.press/dailyish today to sign up and try FeedPress for fourteen days, no contracts or commitments. And be sure to use promo code daily ish during checkout to get 10% off your first year of awesome podcast and RSS analytics and hosting. You get 250 megabytes of file stores that rolls over monthly, and you can add more space for just $20 a month. So again, be sure to use promo code daily as we return checkout to get 10% off your first year.

And also brought to you by Patreon supporters possibly like you, patreon.com/ichris is where you can check out how you can support my podcasting efforts a little more directly with a dollar or 2 a month as well as get free things such as the course that I just launched that I'm talking about. In the last episode, I talked about, putting together the course, how I did it, why I did it, and I sort teased that this episode would talk about the marketing and the sales numbers. So first of all, a bit about the marketing. I'm not a product marketing genius by any means. I do website design and a bit of marketing here for local businesses, but a lot of it is, you know, setting up WordPress and and helping them with the content.

And a lot more of the marketing angle stuff is sort of handled in house or they don't have the budget for it right now. So any sort of marketing stuff I do is a bit more of like personal projects and and dabbling in it and so that's why this product to this or this course was a good excuse to sound try out some of this marketing stuff. But kind of just fumbling my way through and trying different things this for this this one anyways because I didn't really wanna I didn't have time to spend a whole bunch of time sort of developing a big marketing plan for it. Anyways, what I started with was a preorder discounted to $5, posted a link to that on Product Hunt. This is once it's already on Gumroad.

Posted a link to it on Product Hunt, personal Facebook link, and Twitter posts about it. The first preorder came, one day later, so it, you know, was up there for a day from someone I don't know. I don't think I know him. Thanks, Brian, if you're out there. I talked about it on a Daily(ish) episode.

I post about it on my personal blog. A person who pre ordered it tweeted about it. Thanks at s s I e g. Product Hunt then for some reason, I don't know how this happens or if this happens often or just happened to be, you know, a perfect storm. Product Hunt themselves tweeted out a link to it, from their Twitter account, which I think is around a 100,000 followers.

It was featured on another app or service called Launch Lister, which seems newer. But anyways, and at that point, according to Gumroad, I had 947 views, seven preorders for a total of $35. Skipping around a bit, the last day before it launched, Product Hunt featured again in a Medium article about nine tools and resources that will turn you into a Snapchat pro. So this is before it's actually launched, and I don't think I got I've got a few sales from that as well. And then on launch day, which was the Friday last week, I had 19 sales before it was, you know, quote unquote launched.

I actually didn't realize Gumroad, didn't automatically update the price to the air quotes full price. So a sale actually went through with a, you know, lower preorder price, not a big deal. But, just something to remember if you're using Gumroad. Ironically, tweets with links to Gumroad got blocked by Twitter on actually, day before the launch and then on the day of the launch. So that was kind of fun to realize I couldn't actually link to it on my number one sort of platform that I have right now with I think 1,600 or so followers.

And so I post about a launch day on on my Snapchat story which, know, I I think there's 10 or 15 people who follow me on there, they're obviously already on Snapchat. But, you know, the idea being hopefully those folks might tell some folks that they know about it. Justin Jackson sent it out to his secret SMS group of makers as a test project, unknown to me, when he did it, which resulted in a few more sales. And then I just did discuss it on, the course on Justin Jackson's Mega Maker podcast episode 20 on the weekend, which link will be in the show notes as usual. So fairly unintentional and sort of rambling, bumbling my way through it.

You know, stumbled across a good, bit of luck in terms of, product hunts, tweeting it out, and and including it in things, but even that didn't seem to like translate to instant sales. And there's lots of reasons why obviously and and Product Hunt might not be the exact market for something like this where a lot of those folks are early adopters probably just use Snapchat anyways and or discarded it if they've already tried it. So I'm not too bent out of shape about that. It was just kind of interesting bit of sort of trivia I guess to to be a part of. Alright.

So sales so far. I talked about this about this a bit on, like I said, on Justin's podcast, but, my hope was honestly for 10 sales. I didn't I had no idea who would buy this beyond 10 friends, random folks from the Internet. And I'm not being like modest. I know I know people sometimes look, or false modest, guess, false humility.

I I know people look at like, well, you've got 1,700 followers or whatever on Twitter. Well, of course, you'll sell a bunch, but people don't buy I mean, people don't buy stuff like that. It takes a lot of time to earn their trust and translate them into fans and translate them from fans into people who will actually pay money for a thing you're doing. But anyways, as of today, so April 20 now, although it's actually technically April 19, so it might be slightly higher, but you get the idea. 1,987 views to the page, the sales page on Gumroad, 40 sales, for a total of 223, US dollars total earned.

It's important for us Canadians to mention US dollars right now just because it's higher. So that's before Gumroad takes a cut of the sales, which I think right now my take would be from that around a $185. There's some affiliate stuff codes where, like, Justin and others have have tweeted out. Thanks to him as well. And tweeted out about it.

And so they get a a couple bucks or a buck 40 or something from the affiliate links that way. So a $185 divided by twenty hours of work, let's say, is around $9 an hour. So that's actually below minimum wage here in Canada. But obviously so I'm not gonna quit my day job. But obviously now with each sale, I earn more per hour.

So the potential is there to make more. But again, like I said, I was pumped when it passed over 10 I think it was in the yeah. In the preorder stage, it's passed over 10 sales. So I was pumped. That was enough to make me happy with putting the work in as this experiment.

And actually yesterday, today, but yesterday, April 19, I put a $25 into Twitter back from, you know, my sales or whatever to promote a tweet advertising the course. So we'll see how that does in a bit of kind of funny way of Twitter being Twitter. I got two replies from people locally here in Saskatchewan where I live who are kind of mocking and outright saying I was an idiot for doing this course thing or else they're mocking the idea of of advertising on Twitter. I'm not totally sure and anyways, but we'll see. I'll talk about that in the future.

Talk about the advertising on Twitter, promotion on Twitter just to see because it seems like, know, if it's a course that sells for $7 and you can pay a buck or 2 a click, well, you know, you're you're out ahead. I also plan to do targeting some Facebook ads as well and just to see how well that performs for this kind of things. I feel like Facebook is probably a bit more of a better platform for this just because Twitter tends to be filled with a lot of earlier adopters, people who are willing to just try it or Google why they would use it or whatever. Whereas Facebook tends to be a bit more folks who are you know, just a few months behind the that curve of early adopters. So so that's where we sit right now.

It's it's been an interesting ride, and I know that's, you know, from talking to Justin and others, the the course, the sales curve or whatever is gonna drop as it already has today. Like, I think there was one sale today or whatever. It's not gonna keep it doesn't it's not something that it's gonna maintain that level especially if I don't, you know, continue to promote it and talk about it and and stuff like that because it's there's only one time it can get featured on on Product Hunt, let's say, or or whatever. And so that's, you know, just the reality of this this thing. So either you sort of jump on the treadmill and keep producing more courses and more and more and more, or you you continue to tweet about it and promote the one you have, or you go back to making helping folks with their website issues and stuff, which, you know, makes more money, quicker, I guess, in a sense.

But it's been a really fun experiment and like I said, I will definitely do another one. I'm sort of sorting out what it might be. The big one on the horizon is doing some sort of podcasting course that I'd like I've always wanted to do but really been hesitant to be involved with just because it would be such a big thing I would have to do. But, yeah. So trying to figure out what might I might tackle next that would be in the sort of one step above Snapchat tutorial course.

So if you've got a suggestion, I'd love to hear it. [email protected] or maybe you have a question about the project, the product, the course, the process suggestion for something I should have done. If you're gonna say mean stuff, I'm just gonna trash it, so don't don't bother. But I do invite constructive criticism, that's for sure. And, I'd love to hear it.

So tweet me, I Chris on Twitter. Chris at good stuff that I found is my email address, and, thanks for listening. See you next time. Bye.