Lead With Confidence: How To Price?
In a recent Lead Kindly I talked about my upcoming course for new and aspiring engineering managers called Lead With Confidence. I’ve been spending all my “free” time working on it, and I’m loving it more every day. Here is where we’re at:
☑️ Concept, identify transformation
☑️ Outline of Modules and shape of course
☑️ Brainstorm supporting materials to create
☐ Write for each module ← We’re here!
☐ Create slides
☐ Record lectures and edit them
☐ Review course, and reshoot+edit anything that isn’t high enough quality.
☐ Create remaining supporting materials not created along the way
☐ Upload to a platform and start selling!
There are a lot of other steps, but those are the main “creation” steps. For example I’ll need to research different course platforms, work on marketing, creating buzz, etc.
Inside of “Write for each module” is a lot of research, that’s where we actually put things together. Making slides, recording videos, etc are more mechanical and those stages will go faster. The most valuable step is the current one!
Price
I had the thought today to start pre-selling the course before it’s done. I’ve had quite a few people reach out saying they want to take the course, which gives a very false sense of how well the course will do, because a sale isn’t a sale until money is exchanged.
This is where a pre-sale is valuable. If people are willing to put down money for it, there is no question. People not buying during the pre-sale does not mean your product can’t be successful. There is no way better to test the appetite than to sell it early.
However, in order to sell something you have to figure how much to charge, so between writing the modules, this is something I am going to work on.
Let’s dive into the thought process!
Kajabi gives three price points for courses as an example:
Sell a mini course for about $47 to $147
A shorter online course from $197 to $497
A longer flagship course is around $1,000 to $3,000
They go on to say that every course varies, and these are just examples. And this makes sense. A course to edit photos that takes you two hours to go through, is competing against thousands of other courses offering something similar, and will be priced very low.
You could boost the value of the course by tackling something more advanced and niche, that might have less students who are interested in that niche, but they may be willing to pay more for your expertise, and there is less competition.
A speech coach for car sales will make much less than a speech coach for executives even though they are teaching very similar things, the niche is different.
My niche is new or aspiring engineering managers who want to self teach via a course they can do at their own pace. Not a massive audience of billions, and very specific knowledge I’ve spent years learning.
Cost and Profit Approach
One way to think about pricing the course is to consider the cost to produce it, and divide that by the expected number of people who might take it over the next 2~ years, and then add the profit.
Cost of course = (cost to produce + profit) / number of students
This requires understanding all the costs up front. The biggest factor here is labour, where I am the primary person putting the course together. If I were teaching this material 1:1, I would charge at least $500/hour, so if I figure out how long it will take me to finish the course, I can multiply the number by that to get an idea of cost.
I also need to add in hosting costs, fees taken along the way, licensing any assets, etc.
The challenge here is that at this stage with this approach is that I’m not sure how many people I will actually enroll in the course, or how much time it will take me to do the writing. I estimated around 400 hours of effort to produce the course given the current outline, which is pretty expensive at $500/hour. Perhaps there are ways to cut this down by hiring an editor and such, but we’re still stuck with the problem of knowing how many people might enroll.
Part of figuring out the price now, is that I would be able to pre-sell the course, which would give me some estimates on actual hunger for the course. Chicken meet egg.
Value Approach
Another way to think about this is to understand the value we will provide with the course.
Looking at the content of the course, how much extra money might this have made me as a manager if I had been able to take it? If I could have taken it as an engineer, how much sooner would I have become an EM, and how much further along my career would I have been?
Looking at each of the 20+ resources, how much time would each of those saved me? How much better and more professional of a leader would I have looked to my team, my peers, and my leadership chain?
I am also going to pack a lot of templates, and check lists, quick guides, etc into the course, which are all a tremendous value on their own. These each should save a new EM/leader lots of time if they otherwise didn’t have it. Even an hour~ each adds up considering the high salary that engineering managers hold. And each of these are well crafted, they aren’t randomly created. I’m making them an experienced manager.
I am also committed to adding more value to the course over time, and anyone who purchases the course will get the updated templates or additional resources even 5 or 10 years from now.
Lastly, we can also bring all the alumni together so that new managers can have a network of empathetic leaders who all took the course and have a shared jumping off point to connect and start their network strong. A lot of EMs struggle to build an internal network in their company, and we can use the course to help springboard EMs to already have an external network of leaders they can lean on or help.
While I don’t have a dollar amount of all that value as of now, calculating that can help determine how to price the course.
Philosophy on Price and Closing Thoughts
I want buying this course to hurt.
I don’t want people to pay for a course that sits on a shelf.
I don’t want people to pay for a course and poke around once in awhile and get nothing out of it.
I have an entire steam library full of games I bought on deals I will likely never play. I don’t want you to give me your money and then get nothing out of it.
I want you to love this course so much, every time you encounter someone who’s thinking about getting into engineering leadership, you recommend they take this course. “Use your development budget on this, it’s so worth it!”
I want to take uncertain, overwhelmed, potentially stressed out engineers/manager, and transform them into confident leaders.
That’s what I want from the course.
And one last thought: The price analysis is not looking at other courses. Why? Because there isn’t another course like this. I’ve looked. Nothing compares to what I am trying to build. I’ve looked at hundreds of courses, and everything falls short of my vision and what I’m going to offer. And that’s okay, they are doing their own thing, but when I think of price, I can’t compare it to anything else, so it needs to stand on its own. The price has to be right for the audience who will benefit from it the most.