The Art of Selling Online Courses

How We Built an Online Community of 1,200 Entrepreneurs | Matt Gartland

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 149

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Ever thought about what it really takes to build a successful online community that stays active and engaged?

In this episode, we’re diving into the strategies that powered SPI Media’s evolution from selling courses to creating a vibrant community of over 1,200 entrepreneurs.

Join us as Matt Gartland, CEO of SPI Media, shares the inside scoop on how they shifted from traditional course sales to a community-driven approach that keeps members involved and coming back. You’ll discover actionable strategies that you can apply to your own online business, including the essential tools and platforms for building a successful community in 2024.

We’ll also break down the importance of personalized marketing, cohort-based courses, and how to ensure your members stick around for the long haul.

This episode is packed with practical tips for anyone looking to boost their online course sales through the power of community-driven learning.

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to step up your game, this video will give you the insights you need to elevate your online business.

Don’t miss out watch now and transform your online course business!

If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/

Get access to a treasure trove of advice, events, learning, and more: https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Matthew Gartland. Now, matt has had an adventurous career. He started out in an exclusive executive leadership program in the corporate sector. He left that successful career to get into startups and his startup experience has spanned the direct consumer, e-commerce, creator economy and SaaS industries 10 plus years and a few exits later and he leads SPI Media, which you might know smart passive income that Pat Flynn has started. He leads that as CEO and he's an advisor and investor to tech companies on the side. His greatest joy is spending time with his wife and two little girls, and today we're going to be talking about the key strategies that Matt and his team use to build a community of 1200 plus entrepreneurs, how they're keeping community members engaged and active, and what tools you need to use if you want to build a successful community in 2024.

Speaker 1:

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Speaker 2:

It is a thrill to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

So at Smart Passive Income, you have built a community of over 1,200 entrepreneurs. What were some key strategies that you used to do that?

Speaker 2:

It was first born out of, to some degree, necessity and also a significant amount of just vision and innovation for what was happening in the market. Right, where, if I can rewind the clock a little bit, pat and I love riffing in a back to the future movie sense. We're both fans, so it's like get in the DeLorean, go back in time a little bit, uh to around. You know 2018, 2019, where we were selling, you know, all of our online courses very effectively, um, on a on platform called teachable, uh, and this is still, you know, a very common approach, which is, you know, it's do it yourself learning, right, you know. So you have a course and you then try to propel your students to take an initiative on their own to complete that the learning process, you know, get through the curriculum and then to apply it sort of on their own, with probably a very minimal amount of involvement from us or anyone, right, like the course creator. And we were selling, you know, multi seven figures a year in course revenue, because we had, at that point, a pretty robust catalog of courses.

Speaker 2:

But around that timeframe, we ourselves started to feel certain headwinds in the market. Selling was a little bit harder, our courses were a little bit less differentiated in the market. In terms of the subject matter. Podcasting, for example, has always been a kind of a tentpole, like a pillar topic of ours that we've taught and taught very effectively and we were very early into that kind of part of the creator economy market. But then other people, other creators, come around and create courses on podcasting. So again, sort of like from a differentiation standpoint, it's going a little bit harder.

Speaker 2:

So taking that side of, I'd say, like the thinking plus like where do we want to serve and how do we want to serve differently and better, you know, and try to promote ultimately bigger outcomes, that sort of came together with even where the technology and other startups were coming around, which is like you know what you know, involved through the education process, not just sell them a book or an equivalent right Like a course and hope that they completed on their own terms. Can we be more involved end to end? So that was where community came around and it's maybe a little bit obvious these days looking back at it, but it wasn't as obvious back then which was like can we design a truly sort of a, an end to end learning experience and be with our students all the way through. So that was the big kind of jumping off point for like why we really pivoted the entire business model away from just selling, you know, online courses one time, which today we don't at all. So we took that business that was doing multi seven figures a year. We brought it to zero.

Speaker 2:

We don't make any revenue anymore in terms of selling courses one-off and we sell now everything through a community driven uh, offer, um, which is now on a platform called circle, and to to route out this part of you know the, the time machine story. You know it was again built to then be able to facilitate questions and uh and I guess this is maybe the key kind of strategic insight, which is can we bridge the gap between learning and action, helping our students actually apply what they're learning and overcome any number of potential mental barriers? You know like hey, I just learned this thing, but am I really good enough to apply? Can I really do that? So there's a mental factor there, but then also just like some tactical questions along the way around okay, how truly do I solve this? Or maybe there's a hiccup question that we have to get them over and if we're not involved with them, kind of through that learning journey, then we don't have as close an opportunity to, you know, get them over that little hurdle, for them to apply what they've learned okay.

Speaker 1:

So you spotted that it was harder to sell courses, at least in your, in your market. You wanted to help people to be able to actually apply what they'd learned. That sounds like quite a ballsy move still to make that shift when you're doing like seven figures. So you know, you kind of play it back and you're like, oh yeah, we spotted this and we'd figured out that. What gave you the confidence that that was like, did you do it piecemeal or were you like, right, just grab them and jump off the edge like how did they go?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, we did. We did it in phases. Okay, Uh would be the, I guess the phrase I would use. Um, and I would agree with your phrasing Uh, yeah, decently ballsy. Um, it was not guaranteed to work. Uh, most sort of like big bets, new thinking, if you want to label it innovation or not, like yeah, it's a risky thing to some degree to begin a significant business pivot Again, if that language is a good phrase to use.

Speaker 2:

So what we did first was we launched our SPI Pro community. This was actually more hence the label there more upmarket. This was a community that was gated, where you had to apply to get in and we didn't let and even to this day we did not let everyone in. That applies Like, we have a sort of like an algorithm, if you will right, that kind of filters and people can be auto approved or auto declined or sort of in a middle ground quarantine. We do a manual review.

Speaker 2:

So we launched that first to kind of cut our teeth and learn the ropes of community, because we hadn't done that back then. I mean and I guess, if I can have it on the side here and not to take us too far, maybe down a different rabbit hole. But in my learned experience now very much my like, strong and spicy opinion there's a profound difference between audience building and community building. So when we start to talk about community and what does it take to get good around community, to not only sell community, but then to retain members inside your community, it's a very different strategic view. It's a different set of skills and tactics that are required to do that well versus audience building, which both are really important and they're complemented. They're just not the same thing. So anyway, back to, I guess, the story at hand. You know, we launched pro first, which was not that particular community offer, built to be a learning community, it was much more a professional networking and pseudo mastermind community. So at that time we were still selling our courses kind of a la carte, you know, diy courses on teachable and it was actually, uh, three former teachable, uh, you know employees or or kind of top top performers that that left teachable to to co-found, uh, what became circle? Uh, so anyway, so we got on board with Circle. I think we were, you know, like customer number five or somewhere within like their first five. It was pretty awesome and they've obviously done very well since then. So yeah, so that was sort of our foray, so that we didn't like it was still a ballsy bet, but it was like a measured calculus, Like, okay, we'll keep selling courses, let's launch community, we want to be more involved.

Speaker 2:

And then what we ended up doing also as a part of this kind of like journey through time was we de-platformed off of Facebook all of our student groups. So once upon a time, as we were selling, you know, a vast volume of of online courses, we were trying to provide some form of connective tissue to again support members or I guess members really that term didn't exist back then to support our students. So we had independent Facebook groups, per course. So if you bought Power Up Podcasting, for example, and learned podcasting and then wanted to meet other students that had also gone through Power Up Podcasting, here's this Facebook group that you would only ever get invited into and access into if you had purchased that course. And that's a very common approach. There's a lot of other successful creators that have used that sort of mechanism in the past and that, quite frankly, still, I think, use that sort of a solution set.

Speaker 2:

So over time we de-platformed off of Facebook and took all of those like learning student groups out of Facebook and then put them onto Circle, and then that was again sort of part of moving the ball forward right towards this larger vision. That became sort of an all-encompassing, almost like learning ecosystem. You know, on Circle Down that runway is when then and this again came after the launch of SPI Pro came what we call our All Access Pass. So All Access Pass is properly our learning and development community. It is not gated in the sense that people don't have to apply to get in. It is a paid offer. That is where all of our courses now live, the big ones, like Power Up, Podcasting, as well as smaller, more compressed, what we call mini courses or workshops, and all in we have, I believe, at least 18 courses. The big ones, like our big flagship ones, or our more smaller, compressed ones, and that's where our now members can gain access to all that curriculum on demand, you know, based on their interest and their availability.

Speaker 2:

But the key differentiator that we built into over time, drawing on other kind of prevailing concepts in the market, would be the notion of cohort-based courses, which have done pretty well, and we call those accelerators and we run accelerators inside our All Access Pass community. So here's PowerUp Podcast and you can learn it on your own. It's totally on demand, available to you. But here you know, in three weeks we're going to be running a live with async components. You know accelerator again is our term for it Six-week program that will take you through our Power Up Podcasting material. We will be running a couple live events to help you get through that material right. There's then facilitation that is happening by the community team that we have built over time. Pat shows up a little bit in those things, but really it's about the power of the people, right, which is kind of the real point of emphasis and the real value of what community is meant to be.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So you've got a number of elements there that are about keeping people in the community that you've mentioned. So you've got the cohorts, as people are going through the course at the same time and applying it. You've got the fact that you've got everything is set up within circle. Instead of the Facebook groups, you're creating a way for people to connect with each other. They can ask questions in there. So that's like some of the. I'm sure there's a lot more, but that's some of the things that are helping people to stick around in the community. So you have, like, longer term members. What's different in terms of selling the community versus when you were selling individual courses?

Speaker 2:

Right. I would say that one of the profound differences is just the emphasis if you're kind of like, put them on a scale is shifting the emphasis more in the direction of outcomes versus just learning, where, if you're like, hey, come and buy pirate podcasting or 123 affiliate marketing or any of our kind of flagship courses to learn a skill, to learn how to do this thing, is usually the point of emphasis, sort of even across the market when people are selling courses like, hey, buy my course to learn this thing. Right, and it might seem subtle, but at least in our experience and my strong opinion now, looking back at it all, it's like this is actually a profound distinction over time, which is to shift that point of emphasis almost from a copywriting and a marketing standpoint to say it's not just about learning the skill, but what is this going to help you achieve in terms of your entrepreneurial small business? Right, as a, you know, depending on how people self-identify as a solopreneur, a freelancer, an aspiring creator, right, you know these kinds of different persona types. So why learn podcasting? Not to have a podcast, right, but because podcast helps me to potentially enrich and nurture an audience that can then support my small business. So, if I can learn podcasting plus email marketing, plus how to price my offer correctly, whether that offer is a course, and we have an entire curriculum on how to design and sell courses called heroic online courses then, like, the collection of these different learning modules through a journey from A to B gets them that outcome, gets them that almost transformation, if you will, which is I'm going from a spot of just starting and learning the ropes of entrepreneurship and I want to achieve more financial freedom and professional fulfillment on my own terms and I need to learn a collection of things in a certain sequence or combination to arrive at that sort of bigger idea and that bigger result.

Speaker 2:

So that's what we sell. We sell the journey and then, along that journey, we have different key skills and learning things that we know from our personal experience, having done this all the way back to when Pat started a brand on his own. That journey, we have different key skills and learning things that we know from our personal experience, having done this all the way back to when Pat started a brand on his own now to today, serving a global reach of hundreds of thousands of people across all our channels. So that is what we sell. We don't just sell courses. We sell going from basically zero dollars or, depending on where you are in the world, you know, going from zero, uh an income to hopefully some full-time status, uh, depending on how you know.

Speaker 1:

You yourself wanted to find that for yourself and do you feel that you couldn't make those claims when you're selling courses versus the community? Or was there like, is it a level you know? Is it like how far you could promise with it, like what's the what's?

Speaker 2:

the, the difference in the way that you actually would write something about that. Yeah, a couple of things come to mind. One I would say again that it is authentic to just sell education right To help people learn a skill. I mean, that's across almost anything. I see the amazing guitar in your background. People sell guitar courses, right, to help you learn the guitar. It's not necessarily to like help you become a professional musician. You know some bigger idea though. Maybe that's true for some, some creators that have, you know, guitar oriented courses Right. So, yeah, selling, selling just education for education sake is a is a valid and valuable way of doing it.

Speaker 2:

But it became harder again for us at least this was our sort of conclusion to again be differentiated, to play to our sort of sense of a larger vision and purpose for why our company existed and how we wanted to continue to again, I'd say, innovate in terms of what new content by way of curriculum should we develop, which courses should be refreshed over time maybe, which ones should sort of like fade into the background. Quite frankly, based on what we're hearing, you know, the corporate term of this would be like voice of customer, so just like honestly listening, and listening more actively and listening in different ways, in terms of how we're prompting for feedback from you know, not just now today, like our members, but all the way up into the funnel, right up into our email list, which is uh it, you know, in terms of listening to your, to your opening, like, obviously it's so critical to, yes, build an email list, but I would add to that, um, so that you can listen. It's almost like market research I know that's again, again, sort of yet another corporate-y phase or phrase but to really listen and understand what your potential customers not yet customers, but your potential customers that are on your email list but they haven't made a purchase yet are telling you where their needs. And that would be probably the second thing. Coming back to your question I'd elevate the first point was just differentiation. Back to your question, I would elevate. The first point was just differentiation Again.

Speaker 2:

Two is what is changing in terms of demand, customer demand and what we were seeing just around the state of the internet, quite frankly, and then certainly the pandemic factoring into this as well. When that popped off and we were working on our community offer even before, which is a weird sort of wrinkle in time, we started working on this in late 2019. And I was in New York, new York City, with the three founders of Circle three weeks before the pandemic hit in March. They kind of like project, you know, on Circle. It was just a fun, odd timing sort of thing in the time machine, but anyway.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, so consumer demand to come back to it, where you know people just don't want to learn anymore is what we were hearing, right and as more you know, I'd say like even difficulty was happening. You know, economic challenges and people are a little more choosy with their money in terms of, like, what are they learning and where are they putting their money to buy more courses, as just even one thing. Or subscription fatigue is increasingly a thing right Sort of across, like the broader sense of even subscriptions around Netflix and Hulu and Disney Plus and all of the big ones, and Hulu and Disney Plus and all of the big ones. So we had to make sure that we were really trying to be in tune with that and try to align how we sell and what we're selling with where kind of the demand was.

Speaker 2:

And the demand was for more connection, not to learn in isolation. That's lonely, it's increasingly lonely, especially pandemic era. We want to come together. There's more demand for togetherness and for shared experiences toward common goals, you know so. For us, the common goal is achieving greater, again, degrees of financial freedom and professional fulfillment. It doesn't have to be full time. We have a number of folks that we serve that are sort of in that like side hustle status, and that's that's what they want, and that's great. We don't dictate to them what their goals should be, but we're here to help facilitate success on their own terms.

Speaker 1:

And what are you finding in terms of how long people stick around for on average? Because it sounds like you're doing a massive amount of work to try and make sure people achieve their whole life goals as regards, you know, entrepreneurship and building this their side hustle or their business. So I'm assuming that leads to people sticking around for a longer period of time, but what are you seeing on average with that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it will fork a little bit to kind of, I guess, get in the weeds a tad between again, our pro community that's more upmarket and isn't again designed to be a learning and development community by way of like courses, like there's just more or different courses up there versus our all access pass. So in terms of engagement rates and retention rates are going to be a little bit different, whether we kind of isolate our all access paths community versus our pro community. In aggregate we have very strong retention rates. So in terms of churn, if you think about it, even in terms of comparables to the software industry, the SaaS industry, 10% is a benchmarking. You'd like to be a little bit below that and we're a little bit below that, just as we've even kind of built and grown this year, as just even I guess this is another industry comment.

Speaker 2:

Now, community has erupted over the last couple of years and there's so many now community offers and here again a little bit is like okay, how are we continuing to think about how we are differentiated, how we are investing in different ways into our community to stand out and be different and therefore attract not only new people into our community but also help with retention.

Speaker 2:

So, in full candor, we have seen a little bit of an increase in terms of our churn and therefore a slight decrease in our retention this year. So, like that's an active conversation on the team, but still very much within healthy zones. That's an active conversation on the team, but still very much within healthy zones. But it kind of plays into even part of the meta conversation which is great that we're having here, which is, yeah, how do you keep thinking critically about the state of your business, what you're selling, the information you know, the courses you're selling and in our case now you know a very community powered or community driven offer, so that I would say is like the average, you know. So I'd say that we're really good. You know, in sort of the goalposts, as an American phrase. You know in terms of where we need to be, but we're always looking to improve.

Speaker 1:

And if you were going to start building a community all over again, would you do the same as before? Or what would you do differently if not?

Speaker 2:

Oh gosh. If not, oh gosh, I would. I think we did it okay, but I don't want to just say that we did it perfectly because we didn't. I like the idea of bringing people together for the purpose of connection and empowerment and sort of a shared sort of accountability to trade information, to make forward progress, to declare goals. Those sorts of things are, in my experience, more palpable, like stickier, more valuable than just one piece of curriculum, like one course versus this different course. And that's what we did do with Pro Pro again when we launched SPI Pro in 2020, was not sort of this bigger transformation into community-powered learning by way of courses.

Speaker 2:

I still think that's the right move because really, people will stick around increasingly over time not for us, right, or not for you, john, if you were to launch a community. People obviously still come to SPI because of Pat. He's still just a tremendously awesome, valuable, gregarious, personable guy. So that's still a big factor in terms of discovery and whatnot. But when you think about what we see and hear inside the community over time, friendships happen, potential business partners happen, where collaborations are happening and people stick around, not for, like you know, the famous person. They stick around for each other right and that's kind of one of the key insights that I think not that we got everything right, but I think we got that right. You know, in terms of thinking about how we design shared experiences. You know accountability mechanisms, office hour events where it's not just about us. You know being in the spotlight but bringing people together to answer their own questions. And then eventually, when we started launching our version of those cohort-based courses, what we call accelerators yes, it's helpful, but really it's like those student groups that are like trading notes with each other and like interacting with each other, like that's the magic that keeps people around, so that I would replicate that I would do again is really focus on what can you do as a community builder, especially if you're maybe considering this a community offer, either as a pivot away or a pivot forward, maybe, I'll say, from just selling online courses by themselves or if you're going to have a complimentary offer.

Speaker 2:

I'm not saying that everyone listening should all of a sudden stop selling online courses in an a la carte, diy manner. I'm not saying that everyone listening should all of a sudden stop selling online courses in an a la carte, diy manner. I'm not saying that it's just to think kind of critically about how you want to serve your audience. How can you serve we have a team right. Not everyone has a team, not everyone wants a team, not everyone should have a team right. So think critically about community and I think that's maybe another point worth kind of sticking on which is critically about community and I think that's maybe another point worth kind of sticking on which is, with a community-based offer, it's not passive and it's a little bit ironic just to even call it out Like our brand is Smart Passive Income.

Speaker 2:

We've thought for a while that that probably should try to be sunset in some way. We even try to not say the full name in a weird way like out loud anymore, because we try to do like the HBO or the IBM sort of thing these days which, like those much larger corporate brands, like they have a name but it's almost like no one knows about it. You just know IBM or HBO, right? Hbo is home box office. I mean that was that's from like what? The seventies or the eighties. So anyway, for us it's like it's it.

Speaker 2:

But I was drifting the point here, at least on community again, especially if you're trying to do community-powered learning and if it's just you is, you do need to show up. It's not about you necessarily. It's still about trying to get the right people together and to have your members meet each other and to foster those relationships. But you need to develop a different set of skills, likely than what you have today Facilitation skills, different community strategy skills, certainly the tactical and technology skills, depending on what platform you're using to enable all of that, and usually those are not skills that say a creator has by default Right. So those would be new things to learn.

Speaker 1:

And what technology or platforms do you think people should use for building a managed community?

Speaker 2:

and why? Yeah, I would ask the question to help inform sort of the answer to certain technology choices, which is, like, what's the business that you want to have in the future that maybe you don't have today, and how can you make that business, especially if you're a company, of one sort of phrasing, like, if you're a solopreneur and you want to stay a solopreneur, what technology, hopefully, if you make the right choices, is going to be as manageable as possible for you? And increasingly, just if you look at the market right, there's been a lot of consolidation of technologies whereas, like, bigger companies are acquiring smaller companies and thus, like, enriching their feature sets, and or the big companies you know, such as HubSpot, they're all in one Like you can go to these larger platforms and you can have website builders and email marketing and courses and community like these platforms are out there uh, thinkific and uh and kajabi, you know or other very credible options you know that are out there that have increasingly a much wider sort of footprint in the market in terms of, like, what their features are. We use Circle and love Circle and definitely recommend Circle, at least for strong consideration. They are a platform. That, first and foremost, and it's one of the reasons why we chose them and why we still very much love them is they are community first.

Speaker 2:

If you think about other platforms even like Teachable that we love and we know the founder really well like that is a courses first platform that came around at a time in the market and a time in history where community really hadn't popped off yet. That wasn't the thing that it is today, and what was the big thing that they even helped really innovate and grow was just direct selling of online courses right, and they did very, very well with that. So if that's the business model you want to kind of go back to, I would say like almost my MBA question, which is like how are you thinking about the design of your small business? How do you want to compete in the market? How do you want to manage and grow and sustain that business and then choose the right tools, meaning technology, to actually implement and manage that business? Right Circle might be the right choice for you. It may not be the right choice for you. So just think through that business question first.

Speaker 1:

What's the stuff that's a challenge for you at the moment, like what's the challenge around your email marketing or your funnels? What stuff are you finding is either changed or you're trying to figure out how to do it better?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, love that question. We are always trying to get better and the technology never stands still. It's always changing For us and this may be a different problem set than perhaps the average person listening. I want to kind of recognize that on the front end is analytics. So what we're trying to get better at in terms of all the different technologies that we use. We use ConvertKit, which has been rebranded to Kit, for our email marketing. We have Circle as really like our product, because now community is our product. So that's that technology. We have a different technology that we use for the website in terms of the sales pages and things like that.

Speaker 2:

Um, so what we're trying to do better ourselves is to see like patterns. You know, you know traffic coming in from our top of funnel sources. How is that mapping against then into our email? Um, we're trying to improve our personalization, especially in our email. So how are we speaking to?

Speaker 2:

You know, different persona types because of our reach, and this is a legitimate problem for us. Again, it just may be a different problem than other people are encountering, where what we're striving to do is actually clarify our message. We have sort of a generic or broad message and do help a very vast array of different entrepreneurial types, which is both amazing and slightly challenging. Just from like a marketing standpoint to like whittle that copy, have the copy be really sharp, make sure that again, like we have like market fit to you know whom that we're trying to speak to in terms of our ideal customer persona and then build ultimately like a really well performing funnel right. Everyone's interested in building a funnel right In some fashion. So the analytic piece of that is trying to illuminate where we have problems in our funnel and where we have drops and gaps and conversion problems right. So, and then getting all these technologies to kind of speak together right Is getting a little bit easier, thankfully, over time, and there's some third-party platforms like segmetrics, um, that we're actively looking at to to try to help us in that regard. Now, that is a different problem set than you know.

Speaker 2:

If you're kind of in that, that early stage of thinking about your career as a, as a, you know, freelancer, independent person, creator, solopreneur, depending on, again, the labels that that someone chooses to use for themselves, I wouldn't worry as much about probably what I just described for the last 30 seconds or a minute.

Speaker 2:

It's going to be a different problem set and I think with these days, if you don't want me coming back around on a point, I'm increasingly of the mind that for that sort of a person, do probably give a little more emphasis to all in one platforms, because it's likely going to make your life easier, right? Most of the people that we serve in our community and our broader kind of audience, you know they're not coming from technology backgrounds. We are helping, you know, moms and dads find side hustle, side hustle income, right, um, or stay at home parents. You know we're helping folks that are leaving, you know, very non-technical careers, right, um, and that's an amazing thing. So to the degree that you can kind of lower tech, the technology barrier, and make technology less of a concern and less of a even scary thing, then yeah, I'm of the mind that, like thinking about fewer, fewer tools to use, is increasingly a worthwhile sort of decision point.

Speaker 1:

Nice. So if people have been listening to this and they're like man, this, this SPI pro thing, sounds phenomenal. I need to go check it out. I don't want to check out the the all access pass. Where should they go to find out more?

Speaker 2:

that's very kind. Um, I, I might, if, if I can get away with it uh, even offer like two thoughts. Um, just to kind of connect with us and and and learn, check out our story. Pat writes a really great weekly newsletter free, as all good emails hopefully are. Uh, so you can come or go to smartpassiveincomecom forward slash newsletter. It's the unstuck newsletter and it really does speak to one of these prevailing kind of realities and common struggles for at least for us, the people that we serve, which is they get stuck, and they tend to get stuck for a collection of different reasons pretty early into their process of trying to develop themselves as entrepreneurs. So if that even theme and that story of being stuck in whatnot maybe resonates with anyone, pat's newsletter is great, so you can check that out. And then second yeah to a lot of the substance that I'm really grateful, john.

Speaker 2:

We've had a chance to kind of explore today around courses and community and all of this sort of stuff.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think our all access pass, even if someone just wants to like, look at how we position it sort of how we describe our product, get a little more information on our accelerators, which again is our version of a cohort based course.

Speaker 2:

You can go to smartpassiveincomecom forward, slash all access and that's that all access pass, which is of the two I didn't get a chance to maybe mention this previously, but the all access pass has been the one that has grown the most compared to pro. We still love pro but again, as I think about through sort of an executive business lens, like, we're trying to make sure that the thing that we sell is really well aligned with the market segment we want to serve right. The thing that we sell is really well aligned with the market segment we want to serve right and find that market fit, quote unquote. And all access pass is is right, right there for us, which is fantastic to say so. Invite folks to check that out and certainly, if that, even if that community seems like it'd be very valuable to someone on their journey, we'd be honored to serve you. Uh, if you want, you chose to become a member and, as a part of the followup, um, we could, uh, john, certainly like extend a special discount to members coming through from, uh, your audience.

Speaker 1:

Nice, cool. Um yeah, my uh marketing manager has been a member of the all access past before when working on stuff around the podcast, so can thoroughly recommend it, it's been really good.

Speaker 2:

That's very kind of here. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

So if you found this interview useful, you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you've been listening and thanks, as always, for listening to the podcast. We love you. Guys Appreciate you for coming on this journey with us. Matt, thanks so much for coming on today. Man Really appreciate your.