When you run the whole thing yourself, the feedback loop between a bad decision and its consequence collapses to about six hours. That is the entire value of it.
Things I learned by having to answer
- 01Every unclear sentence in an onboarding email costs you the same amount of time it would have taken to rewrite it, multiplied by cohort size.
- 02People do not drop out because the content is hard. They drop out because they lost the thread of where they were.
- 03A weekly live session does more for completion than any amount of asynchronous polish.
- 04Refund requests are the highest-signal research interview you will ever get, and they are free.
On pricing
Charging real money changed the audience, not the marketing. Free attracts curiosity; paid attracts intent. The support load per person went down when the price went up, which is the opposite of what I expected.
You cannot outsource the first hundred support conversations. They are the product spec.
The uncomfortable part: at some point the thing that makes it work - me being in every conversation - is also the thing that caps it. Knowing which side of that line you are on is most of the operating decision.
Also posted on LinkedIn ↗