Those who don't know digital marketer, it's not some rinky dink business. It's been around since 2014.
You and that company have kind of educated an entire generation of marketers, including myself. Our sales for courses and certifications
dropped to 20%
of what they were over the previous period. They they didn't drop by 20%.
They dropped to 20%.
We were willing to take an 8 figure business down to the studs and say every single product we've ever sold, we are no longer selling anymore. Nobody was buying it as much anymore. Sales had fallen off so dramatically,
and we didn't really know how to fix it.
Okay. Ryan, thanks for coming on. I wanna get right into it and
talk about your retirement.
So I I think it's about a year ago now you announced you're retiring from creating
and selling courses about marketing certifications about marketing. And for those who don't know, you've been doing that for a long time, almost twenty five years with digitalmarketing.com
and more. So what happened? Just walk me through that. Yeah. I mean, so
I mean, if we go all the way back, I mean, I started my first business from my college dorm room, and I promise I won't take you from then all the way up until now. But but basically,
the beginning, I was creating content about what I was doing. And I was doing this because that was just the culture of the Internet back then. I mean, there was forum culture. If you were doing stuff, you were sharing it.
It was how I was learning. It was how I was building my network.
And then at some point, I realized, oh my gosh. I can sell this stuff stuff that I'm talking about. People will give me money for it, and that's a way that I can actually fund my different business ventures.
And so, yeah, you're right. I mean, I literally have been creating content related to marketing and selling things online
since the year 2000.
And so, I mean, I went back and I and I looked, and I've been doing it every year since in different
formats, and it started out very informal.
I've got this email list. You can sign up for it. All the way up to,
you know, hey, maybe we should actually treat this like a real business because it kind of is. And that was when digitalmarketer.com
was formed back in, I think, 2013
maybe,
with really just the goal of let's bring all of these disparate products that I have under one roof, under one brand,
and then that developed into,
you know, let's start offering more professional certifications
and things like that. So I've been doing this
basically my entire adult life,
but yeah, around about April
2025,
realized, and really even before then,
realized that this business model isn't working, and we're gonna have to make a really significant
pivot and change, and I'd actually decided at the 2025
that we were basically gonna let digital marketer die a slow and profitable death. We weren't gonna really invest all that heavily in a bunch of new product creation. We were gonna continue serving the members and the customers that we had,
but
we weren't gonna try to innovate because just
nobody was buying it as much anymore. Sales had fallen off so dramatically,
and we didn't really know how to fix it.
We ultimately wound up pivoting the business, which we can get into, but yeah, that was the reason that I said, I'm out. A lot of people thought it was just kind of a marketing gimmick, but here we are. A year later, I still haven't created another marketing course,
and
my, you know, the company's better for it. Yeah. I wanna talk about why that happened, because it was that you weren't the only person
that this was happening to, that there it's not just marketing courses or marketing certifications. It's everybody who's selling any type of information product
or course or or educational product
has felt this impact, I guess, since
2023,
2025.
And that's I kinda wanna part one of our conversation will be about what that impact is, how you're addressing it, how people should.
And then part two will be about a little bit of a still related, you know, how to how to build a durable business in this space. So,
like, why did the why were sales declining?
What do you see as the the market headwinds that are impacting people who are building
media information or education type businesses?
Well, so the first big
pullback that we saw was really just
the post
course
business bubble bursting after COVID,
because really it was during COVID,
when everybody stuck in their house, that this is when we saw just the course business explode. I mean, I've been, again, in this business in this
publishing business for a really long time.
I I'd never seen anything quite like what I saw in 2020 and 2021 in in terms of just not just sales skyrocketing, but everybody coming into the market wanting to go and produce their own courses because they realize that everybody's
buying things.
So there was sort of like that Clubhouse effect. You remember that app Clubhouse?
Yeah. I mean,
the same way that Clubhouse just absolutely fell off a cliff and died because when nobody was when everybody wasn't forced to be inside, they actually wanted to get on and talk to real people. They didn't want to be on a twenty four hour
live podcast type thing.
There was a pullback from the course business, and so we saw that. But I just thought, okay, this is kind of temporal. We had a bubble, the bubble burst, it's gonna it kind of came down, but it's gonna go back up. I've seen this before.
I've seen this game before. But it didn't really come back as fast as I thought it was, and the first big reason that that happened
I think is simply YouTube. YouTube is the first major
headwind
that the course business has seen. Information has always been out there, it's always been freely available,
but the amount of information on YouTube, the quality of information that is available right now today on YouTube
is
like nothing I've ever seen before, and I think the next phase of consumers
of content realized,
we can get a lot of this from YouTube, and many of them were YouTube first. That was where they watched their first video content. Whereas when I first got started, was selling to people who were used to buying books on tape, and I mean literal frickin' cassette tapes.
Right? So that was that was the first big shift that that we saw where I was like, this is gonna be, you know, changing.
The next thing though that really hit, obviously, in in 2023 was AI,
and that was the ultimate headwind that I realized,
you know, okay,
this probably isn't gonna come back
in some areas. There's other factors. You you and I have kind of talked about GLP ones and the impact of just,
you know, as people are taking some of these drugs, as crazy as that, you know, may sound at first to people,
there are a lot of people who buy courses,
and they buy them,
and they binge them,
and
it's it's like
their drug of choice.
You know, I know I'm kind of that way. Like, I like to buy courses, and I like to binge courses, and I think a lot of the people who are out there buying courses are buying everybody's courses.
And just like GLP-1s are really effective at breaking the habit cycle when it comes to food or alcohol or some of these other things, I think it did the same with a lot of people and their course buying habits.
But the biggest ones, and YouTube, AI, without a doubt, biggest headwinds
that aren't going anywhere, that aren't going to change anything.
We were talking a couple months ago at New Media Summit about
how, you know, it's like AI is not perfect.
People, like, they're asked all their business questions. Does it give them the right answer, the perfect answer, or the complete answer, as well as a great course or program could? Maybe not, but you were saying like people are still choosing that alternative over buying your product. Can you break that down, and like how AI is competing directly against educational products? Yeah. If the consumer believes
that
AI will do the thing that your course is going to teach them to do,
they're going to take the AI path
every time.
Right? We would always just rather have the thing done for us than learn how to do the thing. Most people. There are some people who are professional learners, we love to learn, but okay, cool. Once you've sold to those nine people,
how how are you gonna build your business? How how are we gonna scale this thing? That is the promise of AI. Now, often that promise falls well short, but it's not going to stop people from trying that one first.
And so when somebody's really excited to do something,
and they're doing their research, they're like, okay, need to figure out this new skill so I can do this thing,
they're always gonna start with the path of least resistance. They're going to start with the path that's going to be the easiest, and they're going go down it a good long ways.
If
your path isn't the first thing they try, there's a really good chance that they never circle back around
to
your business and your course and the amazing work that you do. I know it's frustrating, and I talk to a lot of people who sell courses, and they're like, but that's not right. That's not how it should be because my course is so much more complete than anything that you're gonna get from AI.
And they're right, and I understand their frustration, but it doesn't change the reality.
AI doesn't have to be better.
People just have to believe that it's at least as good, and they're gonna do it first because it's already there, it's pretty much free, and it has the promise, none of it's going to teach you how to do it, but it's just gonna do the thing for you. I think you've got to ask a question if you are in the course business.
Could somebody reasonably believe
that
AI would just do the thing that you're teaching them to do? And if the answer is yes,
your course business is in trouble. It likely already is in trouble, and that was the reality that we had to accept at Digital Marketer.
One of the promises of AI is you don't have to know how to write copy. You don't have to know how to write an ad. You don't have to know how to create a campaign or to put together an SEO strategy.
AI is just gonna do all that for you. Well, yeah, it does. It creates really crappy copy and, you know, boilerplate ad cam pains and all these things that kind of suck, but it's not gonna stop the person from saying, oh, if I got ChatGPT or I got Claude, I can just do this. I don't need to buy that course.
Yeah. It doesn't mean the skill's less valuable. I've talked to so many people who have
education businesses about how to be a copywriter or how to write SEO blog posts, and they're a zero now.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't learn copy, but this is how the market reacts. So I think we've set the stage, and I think anybody who who has a a 7 or 8 figure
info product business has already seen this. When I talk to people about these market headwinds, the only people I get pushback from, the people who don't see it, are either
selling how to use AI or stuff around that.
Yeah. Exactly.
You're teaching people how to use AI, then you can still sell courses,
which is kind of funny because the reality is AI is pretty good at teaching you to use AI. But, yeah,
if you are doing AI stuff, you can get away with it. I know people who have
one of the businesses that we're in, one of our portfolio companies, is actually a guitar lesson,
chord. And, you know, it's still doing fine because
AI
is not going to play the guitar for you. At least you don't want it to. So if
what you're teaching people to do still needs to be done
in the real world, if it still needs to be done with
atoms and not bits,
then I think you still probably have a decent shot.
The challenge is over
time,
do you think more people are going to say, let
me just see if I can get the answer from ChatGPT, or let me see if I can get the answer from
YouTube,
or do you think more people over time are going to stop using those and go back to saying, oh, let me just buy a course on this? I think the trend
is definitely gonna be towards more people saying, you know, hey, Chad JBT, teach me how to play the guitar. And it's gonna do it, and you can argue that it's not gonna do it as well as you, but that's where people are going to go, there and YouTube. And I mean, just to give you some numbers around this, you know, a digital marketer, we saw in twelve to eighteen months,
our sales for courses and certifications
dropped to 20%
of what they were
over the previous period. They didn't drop by 20%,
they dropped to 20%.
That's a massive
fall off, like nothing I've ever seen, and that's when we knew, okay, we just we have to do something different. I don't necessarily wanna ride this thing all the way to the ground. Yeah. And for those who don't know digital marketer, it's not some rinky dink business that's been around since 2014.
It's you in that company have kind of educated an entire generation of marketers, including myself. Like, when I got started in my adult career,
I was going to digitalmarketer.com
and taking certifications and using those. So it's not some little player. And then the the other pushback I get on this from people who are like, oh, this is YouTube, AI. It's not really affecting you. It's just like they just have really small businesses, and they're not big enough to see the impacts yet. If you're doing you know, if your course did 50 k in sales, like, you're not quite at that level where a a macro impact like this would matter to you, but if you wanna build a scalable business, it it definitely does impact you. Yeah, that's exactly right, and where you're always going to have
an edge
is if you've built some kind of a brand, company brand or personal brand, there's always gonna be a contingent that are going to want to go straight to the source that is you.
And so there there are opportunities there still. I think the question we have to ask in this new age is, is the traditional course format the best way for us to monetize
our
wisdom?
Because we're finding increasingly that no, it's not. I wanna talk about the the best ways to monetize that that knowledge or that expertise in a second. And one question I've always wondered,
kind of unrelated to this, is how do you refer to this market? Because
I've always struggled with this because I talk to a lot of people who sell these types of products, courses,
information products. Like, I've heard people use the term, like, info and coaching or info products or education businesses.
Have you is you've been in this space. You know a lot of people. Have you ever found, like, the right term for this? Because the info products has a little bit of a negative
connotation,
but
I don't know quite what to say. I've always thought this was silly because, yes, people used to call it info info businesses, info products, course businesses,
and I do think the category that you pick for your business is really, really, really important.
I looked at it and I said, this is just publishing.
That's all that it is.
Right? Book publishing is not a new concept,
and when publishers decided that they were going to
publish books on tape, for example,
that was still just publishing.
When universities
publish
research papers,
it's publishing.
So to me, this is all just the publishing industry. That's what we're doing, and so what segment of the publishing industry
are
you landing And within kind of, you've got media and you have publishing, so are we more on the media side,
where we're not so much selling our IP, but we're
gathering an audience?
So those two business models frequently
do go together. Events frequently come along to the media publishing events. I mean, all of these around one another, but I always thought that info publishing
was a stupid
name for the category, and yeah, did wind up sounding super scammy.
I thought the
course business
was just astute. It's like, come on.
It's the publishing
business. That's what it is. Yeah. I think we'd all be better off if we all went over your definition and actually started saying it. It's
hard to get that to catch on, but We would also, by the way, come up with better business models. So one of the reasons that I was able to be successful, more successful, and build a more scalable company at Digital Marketer is because I didn't define it as a quote unquote course business. It's like, okay, we're a publishing company. How do publishing companies work? Well, if you're the publisher, that doesn't mean that you're also necessarily the author.
So there's publishers, there's authors, there's this whole infrastructure, so I could actually look at companies that had been around for decades
that were doing ten, twenty x what I was doing and say, well, how are they structured? What's their business model? Who are they selling to? What, you know, what do their teams look like? And I could learn so much from that. Whereas if you define yourself by these narrow little categories, you're just looking at people who are the same size as you, and it's the same group think, and nobody's getting any better at any of this stuff.
Good point. To go back to
how to monetize
knowledge and expertise now,
you know, this is a big topic and a good question.
What do you think is the new meta? So are we talking about for an individual personal brand, or are we trying to create a larger
corporate brand?
I think what what I wanna do and what a lot of listeners wanna do is they wanna build a publishing business that can scale to 8 figures. You know, they're
maybe stuck at six or 7 figures right now, and they want to build something durable beyond that. Okay. So everything's gonna have to start with
building some type of a media presence,
because
paid traffic mean, when I first got started, my very first business that I ever started online, I was selling an ebook on how to make your own baby food. I had one product,
one
one page website,
and I could buy ads,
and I could optimize
for the search engines to rank and get free traffic.
And that was all I needed. I'm gonna buy ads, traffic's gonna come to this page, people are gonna buy. I didn't need media. I didn't need an email list.
I didn't need an audience. There certainly was no social media back in 1999 or anything like that.
Media was readily available and inexpensive.
Today the exact opposite is true.
Today,
if you want to build
some type of an
education publishing
media type, you've got to start with, okay, how am I going to create my own
media? How am I going to own my own media brand? At its core, that's obviously building an email list, something that you're very, very familiar with, but where we have to start now is pulling people off of the channels where everybody is right now, and where everybody is right now is they're on Instagram, they're on TikTok, they're on YouTube.
So it starts with obviously just publishing
free content, like good stuff out there that people see it and they go, okay, this person seems to have something unique and valuable to say, and I cannot stress enough how important the uniqueness of it is. And it doesn't have to be that you're necessarily saying something that nobody's ever said before,
but you do need to have some type of unique insight, some type of unique perspective, a unique point of view.
Usually this, by the way, is driven by unique experiences.
You've actually done something
that the average bear has not done.
If we can get there and we can start talking about this stuff, and we can now bring them into
an email list and newsletter where people are excited to hear directly from us. So
it's not that
in somebody's feed we happen to show up, and they were like, well, was interesting, like. But it's like, no, no, no. It's the next level. It's the difference between being seen and being followed.
Right? It's I want to specifically hear from this person and what they have to say. This is the first and most difficult
challenge to solve for, but that is where it all begins. Right now, it's an ecosystem where you kind of need to be in different places,
driving into one, and we can kind of get into the tactics of how I've seen that be most effective.
Once you've done that,
now congratulations,
you've built your own media. You have owned
media.
Once you have owned media, and you are a media company,
you get to choose how you monetize.
And the nice thing is is media companies have been remarkably consistent in their monetization.
They monetize through advertising and sponsorships,
which is not my favorite, but it can be effective depending on where you're in. They monetize through premium content access,
of which courses fall in that category, but it could also be a premium community.
They monetize through events,
so let's get everybody together. Right? Adweek
magazine does their
Adweek events, and you got all these different companies that do their big events, lots of different event models.
And then lastly is licensing, and this is where your core IP that you have, you license it, you let other people utilize it in different ways. But those are the four primary
means through which
media companies would monetize,
and you're probably gonna start with just you,
and then eventually if you really do wanna expand it to 8 figures,
the goal should be to expand your media empire from just being a single person media empire to having multiple people
where
you are one of
the faces on your media team, but then there are others as well. And if you just look at any media organization,
that's that's the playbook that they have all run. So I know that's a lot. We can kinda double click on any of that stuff. Let's do that. So I I think we know the four categories,
and
most people listen to this,
they've they've done well with premium content,
and they're probably not we'll talk about events later. They might explore in events. They're probably not a good fit for licensing yet. And then just like you, they're not super interested in advertising. They definitely wanna build an advertising dependent business.
But like we talked about, premium content, like, it's been maybe the best model for a lot of media businesses
in the past five to ten years, but these headwinds have
impacted a lot. And there's a lot of people who I'm kinda speaking to someone who has they've done 6 or 7 figures of some type of premium content offer membership course,
but they're struggling on where where to go next because it doesn't feel like it's working anymore.
So we could take this a lot of different ways. One way we could
is
how have you taken your content offers and adapted them to the new market,
and recommendations
for what other people should do too?
Yeah. So two big opportunities right now that I think,
especially if you've been dramatically impacted by AI, so nobody wants to buy your course anymore because they think AI can do it, there's two plays that you can run.
The first play
is actually kind of a modified licensing play.
So what you do is
you take
your amazing content that you have,
and you essentially
stuff it into AI. You wrap AI around it, and instead of selling content,
you sell
access to your kind of pre trained AI, and that can take a lot of different forms, whether you're
directly selling
GPTs,
or you're directly selling
skills, if it's Claude,
or you're maybe selling prompt packs and things like that. This is what we've done at Digital Marketer. So at Digital Marketer, we've stopped saying,
buy this course.
We've started saying,
get access to this community, premium content, that has all a library of AI assistants, I. E. GPTs and skills,
a library
of prompts,
and all the different tools that we use to train our own internal AI tools.
And so now what people are doing when they log in is instead of getting a bunch of courses,
they're getting AI that's essentially already been trained on our courses. So you could buy, for example, a course on how to do email marketing,
or you could just buy an email marketing skill from us, or prompt pack from us, or a set of GPTs from us that will just do all the things that you would need to do as an email marketer.
Now,
those were enabled by the courses, and so arguably this is licensing,
because what we're doing is we're taking our IP, we're packaging it up in another way, we're giving people access
to it. So that's kind of the first play.
The second play
is you can pivot into services.
So services historically
are not a monetization
mechanism in and around media companies. They can be in some cases,
but in general a service company is more likely to be an advertiser to a media company than a media company is to say, let's spin off a services division. But you do have it,
and we're seeing now
this is becoming far more viable
for people who maybe they don't want to have a service,
you know, they don't want have a service component to the business because they don't want to, you know, have a large team and have to deal with a bunch of clients.
If what you can do, and again, we haven't done this at Digital Marketer, but we could. So at Digital Marketer, we could say,
if you just want us to
build out your marketing campaigns for you, we will do that. Just give us money and we'll do it. And the way that we would do that is we would leverage the AI tools that we built,
which have been trained on our courses,
and we would just deliver the finished end result. This is what we're doing at my other company, at the Scalable company. Started out as a course business. Nobody wanted to buy the course. We said, all right, screw it. We'll just do it with you.
We'll just do it for you. And we work one on one with clients to build out their operating systems for their businesses
instead of having them go through a course to do it, but that process,
which is a twelve to sixteen week process, is heavily enabled by AI. So it's our people
working with clients,
but they're gonna do an interview with a client. All that interview stuff is gonna be fed into
AI that, again, has been trained on our proprietary IP, what in the past would have been called a course.
And now it's just doing the thing for him, just delivering it for him. So I think those are the two
vehicles that you have today, the paths that we're taking. That's great. That's a really concise breakdown. I haven't heard you break it all down that way. I think that'll be super useful.
Do you think so the way I like to learn is by kind of case studies, looking at examples. And so, like, I've I've, you know, go buy I've bought what Digital Marketer sells, and I've learned a lot from that. You can you can go look at getscalablescalable.co,
right, to learn more about what you do there. Are there any other people you think have have made this pivot well? You know, like, someone comes to mind like a Cole Gordon who's
done, you know, services and productized services really well,
but also has a great media presence. Who else do you look at for inspiration?
I'm honestly not seeing a lot of
course first businesses doing this very well right now, which is why I think it creates phenomenal opportunity. And I'll tell you, man, I've been looking, cause I'm looking for inspiration myself.
What I'm seeing some course businesses doing
is they're starting to leverage AI tools
in things like lead magnets.
So here's a little simple, you know, GPT or prompt pack
that will
You can have it for free in exchange for a name, email address, in exchange for opting in
to my newsletter. So they're using them on the front end as like middle of funnel content, gated content.
They're incorporating
AI into what they're doing in terms of I'll teach you how to use it,
but they're so stuck
in the
I'm a course business game
that they just won't
break that. That was the big thing that we were willing to do at Digital Marketer, and we were willing to do it, man, for an 8 figure business. We were willing to take an 8 figure business down to the studs
and say every single product we've ever sold, we are no longer selling anymore.
The only thing we're selling right now is
access to our AI tools that have been trained on our stuff, and I just don't know a lot I haven't seen a lot of other people who are willing to make that move, and I've checked. No. There's not. I think, you know, Hermosy, it's not that he had a chorus business before, but he had, you know,
what was it? Jim Launch was more education and and coaching,
and I like what he's doing with his workshop in advising business. I don't have to get into that, but I think it's a unique model I'm seeing more people copy, of course, because everybody copies
Hermosy and especially someone like him. But it is a cool,
you know, model that's maybe less impacted by AI. It's so in person. It's it's different.
And and I think that's that's another thing that you could do. You could flip it completely.
Again, this is something that has already existed, but I am seeing course businesses
shifting away from
selling access to content, and instead
pivoting much harder into community, especially in person,
and they're having some success with that. There's scalability challenges
there, and certainly logistic
challenges,
but that can also be
a phenomenal model. And I'm not saying, by the way, that courses won't kind of come back around to a certain extent. I think right now it's really depressed because people believe that AI will just do it. Some of that will turn out not to be true. I just don't think it's ever gonna come back to where it was. So if you were running a sizable business back in 2022,
and you're like, I just want to get back to there, I don't think it's gonna happen from selling courses alone. I think you're gonna need to figure something out. And even if you look at Alex, Alex
now has
a I forget, think it's like a thousand dollars a month or something like that, but they've
got what is essentially
a group coaching type deal. There's no in person, there's no services.
Yeah, ACQ Advantage if people want to research it more, like keep going. Yeah. One of the main reasons that people
buy that is because you get access to his
AI CFO tool, Right? So even there, AI is critical
component,
and these internal AI tools are a critical component
of this. And I think we're gonna see this more and more, people just wanting the different AI tools built for them because everybody wants AI,
they want to use AI, but most people aren't getting
as much as they know they could out of AI.
AI just out of the box is an idiot. It's pretty smart, but it's not that smart. So if you've got great IP, if you've got great content, stop trying to sell the content.
Train AI,
sell access to the AI that's been trained on your content.
It's a lot more sellable. It's gonna get a lot better results for your people. That's a good point. It seems like his Alex's marketing angle there is mostly around the primary benefit is getting the ACQ AI trained on all of his content, exactly what you talked about before and what you've done. And then the secondary benefit is, like, community,
some q and a with their team, stuff like that. It's all it's all in a membership product, and they built almost like a small language model all around Alex's stuff, and I heard heard good things about it. I wanna shift to the, like, maybe the other path, which you mentioned, which is kinda like events, live experiences, and one second. I wanna get your take on, like, other things people have tried to kind of pivot away from courses. I've seen a lot of people, like, they had a, you know, one of these nine nine seven courses, and then they kind of built a coaching program on top of that, and they're charging
five, ten times that price. That's been a very common trend.
Do you think that can be a sustainable model if people pivot?
I mean, to me, that's a services business, right? And again, it's the terms that we use. So we use the term coaching, and coaching is a category, like, that is a thing, but to me, coaching is a subset of consulting,
which is services.
And so I would just say, okay, so they're doing a services business now. Now, it's a spectrum. There are some services that are hyper bespoke and one on one, and then there are some services that are a bit more productized.
And so I do love
productized services. That's effectively what we're doing at the scalable company, so when somebody comes in
as a client for us, that first twelve to sixteen weeks is incredibly productized.
Somebody comes through, and they're going to go through a process that will be identical no matter who you are.
It is customized
for each one of them, but the process itself
that they're going through is, and what the output is,
is the same for everybody,
which means that we can actually begin to scale it. And then if they stick with us, now we get into more just kind of bespoke services and consulting type things, but at least for that first twelve to sixteen weeks, heavily productized,
which allows us to get our clients a quick win,
and it just gives us a lot more economies of scale
on the front end. I would just see that as kind of a subset of the services
arm. It can be effective. I think what a lot of people try to do is they try to just sell access to the course
with some calls, like group calls and stuff like that to go along with it and charge 10x.
I think that's gonna be a really, really, really difficult sell once you've sold to all your true believers.
New people coming in who don't yet know, like, and trust you are gonna be less likely to spend 10
for something
if
what you're selling
is
access to a bunch of stuff.
Ultimately, the closer that we can get to selling the promised end result and delivering that, the better we're going to be. Very true. I've seen that too. Another pivot people have made is cohorts,
and I wonder, live cohort based courses or boot camps, I wonder if you think that can be a scalable 8 figure business.
There's not a lot of examples out there. Yeah, know. I mean, and there were a lot of those that were doing really well two or three years ago, right? And they're not doing as well today.
So I think that it's something that you definitely can do. I think it's a good model.
I don't believe it's a business model unto itself, because really, you think about it, a cohort based course sort of sits in between
a pure course business and a coaching business.
And so
it has all of the
sales constraints of coaching, because at the end of the day, when you're selling coaching, you're saying,
I'm going to help you do this thing,
but you're going to do it, and I'm going to be there while you do it.
Now, that's better than I'm going to give you access to the thing you figured out for yourself, but it's still not really what people want. They just want the thing. They just want the end result,
most people.
So with the cohort based thing, have the same issue, you're just now bringing in friction of, well, I can't make those dates, and I'm busy at that time, And so what it does is it creates these spikes
in the business that can be just very
difficult from a cash flow perspective. I know lots of people who've had really good sized cohort based businesses who they basically love life a couple of months out of the year and hate it the rest of the year because they're either starving to death or they're working themselves to death.
But it I think it's a nice addition. I don't I don't believe it's a business model unto itself.
Cool. Okay. I wanna get your thoughts on all that, and we got two different paths. Maybe a third path you've done successfully is events and conference businesses and things like that, so I'll try and move a little bit faster and kinda get to
your your frameworks around events. So for those who don't know, you've built, scaled, and sold some really big events
or or really maybe one really big event business and and multiple other big events.
Can you kind of tell me what that is and, like, tell us the scale that that was at so people can be aware of it? Yeah. Sure. So Traffic and Conversion Summit was an event that we launched back in 2008,
really before digital marketer was even a thing,
and it started out as just a very small kinda
let's see if we can get some people on the email list to show up for this event, probably kinda how your event started, right, a couple years ago. Team Traffic Conversion Summit was the same way, and it just
it grew year after year.
People loved showing up. The content was good. We didn't it wasn't a pitchfest, which a lot of the other events were back in the day, which is sort of its own which is its own model, and we ran that event. We sold that event after year nine.
You know, COVID and just, I would argue, some mismanagement by the acquirers. Part of the is no longer around anymore,
but that was an 8 figure business just by itself.
And, yeah, we were able to sell that event for, I mean, truly a life changing amount of money for for me and my and my partners.
So they can get big.
Events are highly,
highly scalable if you pick the right model for them. Yeah. I'll talk about the model in a second, but TNC was was it 15 or 20,000
attendees at the peak? I forget the It was actually it was right at 10,000
at the peak. Paid,
ticketed attendees.
Now, in and around the ecosystem of the event was at least 12 to 15,000 people, because there were events popping up around it kind of just
sucking off of it, which is what, at scale, it's what you want to have happen.
Now, you'd like to own those events too,
but that was kind of the ecosystem that was there.
You were telling me a long time ago about
there's kind of two different
event models,
and so if someone's kinda considering launching an event,
tell us about those two models. And if there's more than two, let me know too, but I think that's a great starting point for this. There's basically three, I would say, kind of big models. The first model of an event is the expo
event. And so the expo event is
it's basically a trade show.
Right? I mean, if you think about a Comic Con
or
a gun show,
you know, or any
of the baseball cards, any of these events, or really large trade shows, those are expos.
People are coming because there's a trade floor, and people are coming because other people are there. There's some type of two sided marketplace.
You've got buyers, and you've got sellers, and they want to meet each other. And this is kind of a very classic
It works in B2B
and B2C,
but the expo,
if you've got that kind of two sided
marketplace, think, these can be incredibly
profitable. They're hard to build,
they're expensive, they take time to get going, but if you can pull it off, really valuable. The other type of event is the convention.
So the convention event,
this is the event where people are coming mostly for the content,
and they're coming for the networking.
So there might be a little trade show there, but mostly people are coming because
other people are there, and this is where all the best ideas get get shared. That's what digital marketer
I'm sorry, that's what Traffic and Conversion Summit started as. Eventually, these models can get blended into what's known as a convex,
so a convention expo, where you've got a really good sized convention component, and then there's also a large expo floor. That can definitely be a model, but it's usually gonna be more convention y than more expo y, or more expo y, more convention y. The third type
is
the community event,
or the sales event, for lack of a better
term, and this is where
it's a single track, typically one stage,
and you're getting your community, your audience to come in
to with the goal of monetizing not necessarily through ticket sales or through sponsorships, but through sales at the event
of your products and your services.
That's the main thing. So you talked about Alex Ramosy and his workshops that he's doing.
That's actually that kind of event in smaller scale.
What we're doing now at Scalable
is that type of event in,
you know, larger scale.
Trafficking and Conversion Summit started out as that, and it shifted into
a convention which is gonna monetize through ticket sales and sponsorship, same with
an expo style event. So the model that you pick is important, and you really wanna be thoughtful about that. Yeah. And I wanna just maybe break down convention events a little bit more, because that's what I'm building, so I'm gonna be selfish, and a lot of people listen to this have that too. If someone wants to you know, see a good community event, they should go to GetScalableLive
or go to her Mosie workshop and just that's the best way to learn how to do one or any event really is just to go there. I mean, what what's the business model of convention events? Like, is the real money made through ticket sales
or the sponsors
or exhibitors?
Yeah. A healthy convention event is half and half. So you've got about 50% of your revenue coming in through ticket sales, and about 50% of your revenue coming in through
sponsors,
which may or may not They might have a booth if you've got a little expo floor, or they might just have their name on a building, or they might be getting a speaking slot, which I don't always love,
but that can be another way to do that. And if it's fiftyfifty, it's really, really healthy because it means that people are willing to pay to come to this event, they value the content,
but also the types of people you're getting are high enough value that other people want to pay to have access to these people. So that's the that's the best model for that. Whereas like an expo event, it might be eightytwenty
sponsors and exhibitors
to ticket holders. There's lots of expo events where they basically give away the tickets.
Very true.
Tell me about,
this is a big question, just like all my
sponsorships and exhibitors.
But, like, for me, getting someone to buy a ticket and delivering a good experience is not easy, but it's straightforward.
Working with exhibitors,
there's feels like there's more moving pieces.
And also, there's a difference between a sponsor and an exhibitor
from what I understand.
So is if you're talking to someone like me who's got a year, like, one to three event,
who's trying to figure out how sponsorships
work, how to sell, and how to fulfill on them, what would you recommend?
You are going to if you're looking at doing a convention style event, and you want to create the place, because that really is your goal. If you're creating an event a convention style event, you want this to be the place, Not just for your people,
but for
an industry,
for a cohort, like people need to say,
because I'm a this,
I go there. That's the key to a convention.
Because I'm a this, because I'm one of these types of people, I go there because my people are there. Now, that doesn't just happen overnight because you decided it could happen. You could do a community event
overnight because you got your audience, hey, I'm gonna be here, and you wanna be here because I'm here.
A good convention
event, people come because other people are there, not because of the person hosting the event,
and that's the shift that needs to take place,
but they usually start looking at community
events, and that shift, that pivot, takes three or four years. The reason that's important is because
until it starts to become the place,
sponsors and exhibitors don't want to be there either.
So you're kind of in this chicken and egg scenario
where
you've got to get enough critical mass built up to where it makes sense for a sponsor and an exhibitor to be there, and it's not until you're getting to around about 3,000 attendees
that
it really makes sense to charge, you know, ten, fifteen, 20,000 and up
to sponsor that event, and really where you want to get is you want to get to where you have 50 and $100,000
sponsorship
levels.
By
the end at TNC, think we had a $250,000
sponsorship
level.
That's gonna be really difficult to justify if your event is 400 people, 500 people, unless it just happens to be some
of the wealthiest people in the world, and the average order value is crazy high. But, you know, drawn from a
speaking in generalities,
you need about 3,000 people. These become the place. This is gonna take a good number of years. You need to have multiple stages
so that there's room for people to go. So we're talking about more
room for people to sit, so that's increased complexity, and you also need to create flow where people are walking around so they're not just all stuck in the same room all day because exhibitors don't necessarily like that. So that's why right now, I mean, you just had your third year, right? Second year. Oh my God, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're right just in the suck of it, right? Year
two is the worst, because year one,
it's fun and everything's new and people are coming out.
Year two,
it's when you're trying to grow and you're trying to get bigger, but it just hasn't gotten
that much bigger yet. It doesn't become a habit
until about year three, and it's in year four where you find out, okay, are people coming because it's there?
They're not coming because we asked them to come, they're not coming because we advertised it well, they're not coming because of the amazing speakers,
they're coming because it's there.
And when that happens,
it really is that if you build it, they will come. If you will build the convention,
you will now have sponsors just asking to be there. And I was thinking at TNC, we were able to tell everybody, we got one premium booth and one premium sponsorship. Somebody's gonna buy it. Do you want it to be you? Yeah. You don't really need to have a sophisticated
sales process or
or a 30 page deck to to do that when you when you build that type of
you know, cornerstone event. Well, you're still gonna have to have a sales process and a sales team to, like, sell these things. But I guess what what I'm saying is, like, I may be obsessing about some of the tactics when I need to look at the big picture like you'd like, you just broke down and focus on that first, and then I'll I'll still get those details as we go. Our goal for Traffic and Aversion Summit,
you know, years one, two, and three was we didn't care how much money we made.
We just wanted everybody to leave and say, holy crap, that was the best event I've ever been to in my entire life, because we knew if they thought that, that they would come back, and they'd probably tell somebody else that they needed to be there too, and that's exactly what happened. So we just focused, and this is cliche, right? How do you a large audience? How do you succeed on YouTube? There's all these tactics and stuff like that, ultimately it comes down to like, do you have good stuff? Do you have good content? Do people like watching you? If you do, you win, and if you don't, you could have the best hook and follow all the perfect thumbnail formatting and all this other stuff, but if your content sucks, it's not gonna get traction.
And so you just need to put on an amazing event,
and you're probably going to lose money
the
first two or three years.
We did. I think we maybe broke even year three,
and it really didn't start to take off until about year five or six. That was when it got
incredibly profitable.
Yeah, and it's almost like you should be breaking even, because there's a correlation between how much you spend and how great the event is.
So if a year one or two event is super profitable, the attendee experience probably wasn't as good as it could have been. I think that's a great point. You should be putting it back in there,
but saying, okay, we're spending this money.
Are
the attendees going to value it? And so maybe you don't need to spend as much on the AV budget in the beginning, but maybe you want to spend a little bit more
on having some incredible speakers that people are gonna be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they're here, you know, and we got access to them, if that's something that your audience cares about.
Maybe what your audience cares about are the parties,
as funny as that sounds. And so you say, we're gonna spend more money on just an amazing,
phenomenal party
the evening after day two of a three day event, because we want everybody talking about this party and how they wanted to be at this party. So understanding
what your audience values and where you should be allocating those resources so that it becomes the thing that they talk about and the reason they want to come back,
that's the secret. That's the magic. And for Trafficking and Conversion Summit,
we invested heavily
in
speakers and celebrities when everybody was like, that's stupid. You shouldn't do that. None of our peers were doing that at all, but it was such an elevation of the event. Now, if I were doing that event today, probably wouldn't do that. We would probably take a different path, because just speakers and celebrities we found aren't the elevation that they once were,
but that was where we chose to put our budget, and we overspent there dramatically,
and underspent
in a lot of other places.
So that was the
idea.
Yep. That's really helpful. Maybe if I can get two or three more tactical event questions in because we we're gonna wrap up soon. Sponsorship tiers, is there anything that worked well for you? Like, you see the kinda, like, the one, two, and three or the platinum silver gold or
that work well. And I guess what I'm
what we're struggling with is every sponsor wants to speak, and every sponsor wants more and more stuff. They want you to send an email or this or that. Right? And then the best sponsors for
not the best, but great sponsors are people who are just they'll pay
just to exhibit and just be there and just have booth space. Right? It's it's a easy sell. It's easy to fulfill as a event organizer.
And so we're trying to to to figure that out. Like, what are our tiers? What do we offer the higher tiers?
How do we make that worth it without
putting everybody on stage? Because we're not gonna do that. You know? Again,
big question, but anything that's worked for you would be interesting. Yeah. So you want to be crystal clear on what's
the highest tier
of all,
and what does that work to you, and you're gonna sell that to one.
There's gonna be one that is
they are the presenting sponsor,
and so it's gonna be their name on all the stuff, and you're gonna say, okay, what does this sponsor get? And the reason you want to do that one first is because that's essentially gonna create the category of all of the things that somebody could maybe get.
So
they're gonna get
So for us, it was Traffic and Conversion Summit presented by whoever our presenting sponsor was, and we actually always had two because
one of the presenting sponsors was always digital marketer.
Made sure that our own company was a presenting sponsor at
our event,
we made it clear to the other presenting sponsor,
yeah, it's shared, but the other one is us, so you're in good company, and they were always fine with that. That's what's gonna create the
list of deliverables
that they're going to get, and that
sponsor's getting all of them. So you've got to decide what are the things that you're willing to do. We were willing to give a speaking slot to the presenting sponsor,
but we got to approve the topic, and we got to approve the speaker. And what we always sought to do, because
putting people on stage,
to me that is the riskiest and the most valuable thing that you will give away, So you want to be very, very, very careful with that, because if they go up there and they do a crappy session that's just a pitchfest,
now all a sudden the talk of the event is, uh, all these the whole thing's just a pitchfest, everybody's just paying to be there,
sessions aren't any good, and they stop coming back,
and that's where it rots from the inside. So we were hyper protective of the stage,
because that's what people valued. Now, if people are coming to your convention and they don't really care that much about the sessions, they more care about the networking events, it doesn't matter as much. So I want to make sure I'm not coming off as dogmatic,
it just depends on the model, but for us at Traffic and Conversion Summit, people were coming for the content that was put up on there on the stage,
so that was the thing that we were the slowest to give away. But you want to look at every single thing that is out there.
So you have a stage,
you have a room,
does somebody get to put their name on that room? They get to spot Is it So we would have, you the You might have the beehive stage.
They get to own that stage and get it branded around that stage. You're gonna have coffee. Who's sponsoring the coffee? Is there a brand on the cups themselves, or is it just a sign around it? You're saying, hey, thank you. You might have some, you know, obviously you should have some booth spaces somewhere. How big is it?
So all of these things factor into it, and we would always have one kind of presenting sponsor. We'd have the level below that where we would have two or three,
and they would usually get a stage named after them as well. They'd get the largest possible booth, and they'd get a bunch of other things
thrown in.
And then below that, now you're talking about, you know, the gold and silver, and that had almost everything to do with
booth size and location.
So the better locations got the bigger areas,
those sold for the most.
The ability to send email communication to attendees before and or after
was another thing that we would, you know, at times throw in.
So just coming up with a list, and AI is really great at this, by the way. I wish we'd had that. Hey, I'm doing this event. What are all the things I could possibly give away, you know, included in a sponsorship deal? It'll be hugely helpful.
Yeah. I mean, And just creating the package and prompting
it and saying, ask me details about the event
so that you can help me brainstorm additional ideas, I would definitely do that. For us, though, going back to stage time, we made sure that we approved the topic, we made sure that we approved the speaker, and what we said is, we're not gonna let you just go up there and do a pitchfest. It has to be content,
and then at the end, we will come up, and we will sell your thing for you.
And you want us to do that,
because then you get to maintain total authority during the event,
because all you did was give content.
When we come up, we'll say,
you should definitely go up there, you should use them out here, here's a special thing that we got them to do for you,
and
it's just way more effective and way cooler for all involved, and that's how we got around that. Even if they wanted to do content, sometimes we'd
say, well, do you need to do the content, or would you like to have somebody on our team do the content about how we're using your tool?
Wouldn't that be even more effective?
We would build content presentations
for them
because it was just better for all involved.
Yeah. Those are those are all fascinating things. Definitely gonna listen to this later. But, like, I've always wondered, like, what's the perfect event format? And I've obsessed over, you know, should we or should our sessions be forty five minutes
with fifteen minute breaks, or should they be thirty minutes? Or just I don't wanna get too nerdy, but
maybe as the last thing, have you have you found for someone who's building these types of events, convention events,
what type of programming schedule has worked well for you, or just what what do you like personally? Yeah, I mean, and this matters. This is a phenomenal question, because this really, really, really matters.
Break time at events
is critical, because if you don't have long breaks at events, your exhibitors will get pissed,
and we made this mistake at TNC.
So we would have forty five minute sessions with thirty minute breaks,
and our session times were all the same.
We made the mistake
one year, and then we
repeated the mistake a few years later, because I guess sometimes we gotta learn We do the same crap over and over again and have to relearn it, but where we would say, okay, we're gonna have forty five minute sessions, and then we'll have thirty minute sessions that'll be a little bit tighter and more concise,
man, it was so hard to manage
just logistically,
especially when you get on to different stages.
So when you have multiple stages, you really need everything starting and stopping at the same time,
and
when you got into those tighter
sessions, it's just really, really, really hard. So the only exception that I would make is
we might do a double session, so if there was gonna be two people back to back and they were gonna be two twenty minute sessions, then we would kind of clump them together.
But when you have multiple stages, the problem is is people will get up in the middle of this one to go over here, and it just creates
this weird visual of everybody leaving when a new speaker's coming up. So I'm a big fan of there's a session, there's a break. There's a session, there's a break. There's a session, there's a break, and on and on and on just like that. You can typically get three in in the morning,
three or four in in the afternoon depending on how late you wanna go.
Call it six sessions. We would run and do sessions over lunch, the way that we would stagger lunch. At scale, you need to do that so you don't overwhelm the facilities at the location anyway,
and people are sort of picking and choosing
what they want to do. But aside from we might have the opening keynote,
that might be a longer hour long session,
and I do like the idea if you have multiple stages,
you can have the first session
be everybody in the main room if you have room, and then after that you go into breakouts, and then the last session bring everybody back into the same room.
Yeah. If you can make it you can make it work. Yeah. I really like that format when I was at TNC,
and beginning and ending there. You have to do long breaks for two reasons. You want people to network with each other and the sponsors, you want them to reset
themselves.
Bathroom lines at scale get really long,
so we've just found that thirty minutes
is about what you need, and again, people are not just there for the content, they're there for the networking. So we value that time and create spaces for networking within
your event.
Yeah. What I didn't realize is if you just give a fifteen minute break,
they keep there's not enough time to network. It's basically bathroom or check your phone and come back. It goes by super quick, so so you need that longer.
I saw a couple cool things at TNC where it's like during those breaks or lunches,
there's almost like different activations, like a meetup for agencies or any
last question would be like, any cool things, like, in the actual convention space
that you did outside of breaks and actual onstage sessions that people really enjoyed or that you would recommend,
I do or other people do? Yeah. The first thing I would look to do, if you can pull it off and if you have the space for it, if you can have some kind of a stage
out on your expo floor,
that's really great because it kinda creates
just some noise, and will draw people out to the expo floor.
You obviously don't want it to be right next to somebody's booth, or that's a little bit obnoxious,
but if you have the space for it, having an additional stage out there, that's also a place where you can run demos, and you can give sponsors access to that stage. We started doing that I think year
eight or nine at TNC. That was a
big win
overall, because it did create an activation. It wasn't running
always at the same time. Frequently, we would have it run during breaks.
And so how you program that stage, it's the only stage that could be on a totally different schedule than all of the other ones, you know, by design. If you can have sponsors
who will
give things away, like we had a sponsor every year who gave away a car,
and that was the deal. If you're going to sponsor, you're like, you're the car sponsor,
and so you're gonna be giving away a car,
and your price of admission to be a sponsor
is gonna be reduced by the fact that we know that you're giving away a car.
So maybe it's a $75,000
sponsorship that they only pay 25,000 for.
Now, why do you want to do this? Well, again, if you've got the space for it, and if you've an Expo floor, can. They won't let you just do this in any hotel, but if you park a car in the middle of a floor and they wrap it with their logo and stuff like that, that's something that people will walk around and look at.
So that does create kind of a separate activation.
Also, you do the drawing, that's a phenomenal opportunity. Everybody's in the room, they want to find out who won the car.
Not something you're probably going to do year one, and it doesn't have to be a car, but just think, what is something really, really, really cool that is a visual that we could give away, that our audience would desire?
That creates an on the floor activation.
Just different
little
events and things that are out on
the floor, like having a pop a shot. We had one
of those electronic
bowl writing deals,
but every single one of these activations
is sponsored
by one of the exhibitors,
so it's not something that we just are paying for.
It's something that a sponsor is paying to be there. Coffee, like having a coffee stand, a bar
on the floor, where people You're creating now a networking space for people to gather, You could say, hey, from this time to this time, this sponsor's hosting a happy hour, where they're doing and they can have a special drink named after them.
So anything that you can do to create these opportunities
that
just make people feel like, well, that was fun is good. In addition to that, want to think, how do we get people together? How do we connect them? And so creating meetups from this time to this time, everybody who's in this type of space, they're gonna be gathering in this spot, and having somebody on your team who's there to sort of facilitate
the networking.
And then another thing that we would do for our highest level sponsors
is we would ask them, who is your ideal
person that you absolutely want to connect with while you're here? Who's your ideal client profile,
avatar, all that? And we had a team
that would schedule meetings for them,
for our highest level sponsors.
So if they wanted to meet
CMOs of companies in this industry of a particular size,
we had our
partnership and networking team
who would
review the folks who would come to the event and say,
hey,
the good folks over at XYZ Corp would
really love to connect with you.
If we can facilitate a meeting. They're
looking to buy lunch and all this other stuff, and sort of create a thing that
both mutually agree that they're gonna show up. So whether it's direct one on one connections,
creating meetups for
subgroups within your larger group,
and activations in and around the event. Parties are another
good if you're the top sponsor results in the sponsor for a party.
All of these are things that you should look to do so that your event isn't just what happens
when the emcee walks up on stage at 09:00 and when they dismiss everybody at five. The things that are happening between and around, that really is what makes an event.
Yeah. That's really good advice. The the meeting thing is
one thing we definitely
among all that stuff is one thing that was highly requested.
And and there are people who that's all they do, by the way.
And they're a company you can hire temps that that that's basically all they do just, you know, just for that event. Yeah. It seems like there's some events where some are just built around that where some people attend for free, but they have to schedule meetings.
It's a whole another can of worms we don't need to get into, but Yeah. It's important. This this has been great. Ryan, where can people find you if they wanna learn more about Scalable or any of your other stuff? I'm posting all of my content for free on YouTube because I'm like, nobody's buying it anyway, so let's just put it out there for free. So
if you go to YouTube and just look for you know, search for Ryan Dice, d e I s s, you'll find find me there. I do also have a newsletter at accidentalmba.com,
so if you wanna subscribe to my newsletter. I've been consistently publishing
now for over a year,
every Sunday for over a year.
It's all me.
I don't have outside writers.
I use AI for the brainstorm, but I mean, it's me actually writing the thing, doing all the all it's the only thing that I do where it's just a 100% me.
And so I'm I'm very close and personal to that to that newsletter as well. So
Yeah. I'm a big fan of both, and we'll put a link for both and and more down below. So thank you, Ryan. Yeah. Thanks, man.