The Course is a Commodity, The Mentor is the Product

The course or the content is not the product. The mentor is the product.

If you are reading this post randomly on the internet and don’t know who published it, you will not value it. You value the content in this post because it comes from someone you respect and admire. Correct?

When selling a course, a mentorship program, or a mastermind, there is no intrinsic value in the content itself. Many digital marketing coaches and business coaches have very similar content. But the learning process is not like taking a vitamin supplement. The course is not a commodity.

I have trained more than 14,000 students in my Digital Marketing Internship Program (now called the Micro Internship) and it has changed people’s lives. They have got jobs, become freelancers and many have started their digital marketing agencies as well.

They go through my content and take my content seriously not because of the content itself, but because of me. They see that I have worked as a digital marketing manager and run my own agency and they BELIEVE that if they follow my advice they can also become like me.

If someone had access to the content of my course, but no idea who I am or what I do, they will not take my content seriously. Because they don’t take the content seriously, they will not take any action because of the content. Without action, there will be no results. And hence the course is useless for them. The course is a commodity.

The course becomes a life-changing course, because of the creator or the mentor of the course. The creator or the mentor has achieved something in life and the student is inspired and wants to achieve similar things. The value comes from inspiration because of the mentor.

The produce is loaded with the marketing and the personal branding of the mentor. That’s why a lot of coaches and mentors spend more time in marketing, lead generation, and nurturing the audience than in the delivery of the product.

Let’s have an example from Nike. Nike manufactures shoes for $5 in China and sells them for $50 in the US. Some brands sell similar shoes for $10 as well. Why do people pay a premium for Nike shoes? Where is the value coming from?

If Nike launches a limited edition shoe for $50, the person wearing that shoe feels special. His friends think that he is cool because of his nice shoes. The value is in the “cool”. And the value is not created in a factory in China. It is made in the US through marketing, positioning, and branding. So in this case, the marketing is the product, not the underlying commodity.

When a business coach is selling a business training program, the underlying commodity, the content of the course, might be similar to many other coaches. However, how the coach or mentor has positioned himself in the market matters more.

If someone is selling a course on how to build a Micro SaaS product, I would rather buy it from someone who has built a successful Micro SaaS product than from someone who has never built a Micro SaaS product, even if the content is exactly the same. Even if the content is better in the latter case, it’s still not useful for me because if I do not believe in the content, I wouldn’t take any action on it so technically the content is useless for me.

What the mentor has achieved matters more than the production quality of the course. Many successful mentors have simple slides, no fancy graphics, and studio production in their course videos. It doesn’t matter. Do you like the mentor, do you believe in the mentor, and has the mentor achieved something of their own matters more. The mentor’s personal brand influences the quality of the content indirectly. It’s subjective and not objective.

If you want to build a strong coaching business, you need to spend 70% of your time creating content for free. When you create content for free and give it away to your community of email subscribers and group members, they respect you and pay attention to you. This builds your personal brand. This is the product. You are creating a perception in people’s minds and that’s of very high value by the time they come to buy your course.

Not everyone will buy your course, but a good percentage of your audience will buy your course which is enough to pay for the time, money, and energy spent in creating content for free. When you make revenues from the course, use a percentage of the profits to build distribution for your free content and keep repeating the process until you become the No.1 Mentor in your niche.

In my blog post about the Night Club Business Model, I have explained about Entry Gates and Walled Gardens. A lot of effort needs to be front-loaded on the top of the funnel before selling a high-ticket mentorship program.

You cannot survive without a high-ticket mentorship program because the lead costs have gone up in the last 5 years. However, just creating a great program is not enough. People need to know about your achievements as a mentor or coach even before they hear the sales pitch for your program.

I don’t mean to say you can have a bland course and do great marketing. If your product is bad, then your marketing will speed up the downfall of your brand. A great product is a basic requirement. However, without great marketing, even a great product won’t see the light of the day.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju