Early results: earned back course cost in 4.5 months
In April, I shared that I'd just signed up for 30x500 and I promised to share progress as I went through.
Overview
The course has two modules—one on understanding and building an audience and one on building a business to serve them. Since I already had some success with Alchemist Camp and didn't want to risk damaging it until I knew more, I chose to start building an entirely new audience around TypeScript programmers.
The course requires a lot of time and effort, mostly revolving around exercises to understand your audience, but I was pretty happy with the results. I spun up an audience of hundreds of followers over a couple of months and my tutorials seemed to resonate with them. After seeing that success, I continued on to the 2nd half of the course and started applying the first half to my main side project. I finished the second half a couple of weeks ago and then did a simple email sequence using what I had learned.
Results
That sequence pulled in 23 new subscribers over 3 days at an average of $150 each. Based on the divergence of my audience (free and premium) from its earlier growth rate, I attribute about 80% or about $2750 to 30x500. In other words, I've earned back the cost of the course in about 4.5 months.
I'm looking forward to doing a second pass on the materials that were harder and doing an improved version of the same email sequence in 3 months and also launching a new product for the same audience around that time.
Another effect of the course is a renewed interest in the offerings from others connected to the 30x500 community like @NathanBarry's ConvertKit and @brennandunn's training courses.
Evaluation
All in all, I'd say it's a great course if you can afford it and if you are willing to do the work!
One of my good friends bought it a year and a half ago and largely sat on it until I bought it and started sharing what I was doing with it. I think even he's going to end up with a positive ROI now that he's started going through it again, but obviously the course doesn't build your business for you.
#30x500 #progress-update #learning #launch
Thanks for the writeup! Would you say the course is only worth it if you have an existing idea you want to pursue or do you think it's helpful even if you're in the idea-generating/choosing phase?
One of the things the course emphasizes is doing research before coming up with product ideas. You definitely don’t need an idea coming in. (It’s an advantage to not be married to an idea so you can let the research guide you)
I think it can help you avoid choosing a bad audience or an idea you don't have the resources to execute.
I'm sure I could build a business off the audience I picked during the course... and for that matter, I used its lessons when coming up with my next product (currently in the very early stages).
I have heard people talk about 30x500 but when I look at it, it just seems like another extremely expensive guru course.
Is there anything about 30x500 that sets it apart from the thousands of other BS "how-to" courses out there?
I'd say the track record of outcomes does.
I'm not trying to sell it, and had some reservations myself. The reason I bought it was the repeated endorsements I've seen. Joel Hooks, Nathan Barry, Patio11, Brennan Dunn and many others spoke highly of it.
Another thing different from the (Ramit Sethi / Dan Lok / Tai Lopez / etc...) style "guru" course is that with those courses, every glowing review seems to be written by an affiliate, whereas I don't think 30x500 even has an affiliate program. The only reason I wrote this is that I found it genuinely useful and I've been on IH commenting about a lot of other stuff for almost 3 years now.
Thanks for the input. To be clear I wasn't implying you were selling the course or anything, I am legitimately curious what sets it apart and makes it worth the high cost. I continually have folks ask me if I can recommend any training or courses, and just haven't found any worth the cost yet.
I haven’t done the course, but I used to read Amy’s blog waaayyy back about it and bootstrapping generally (sometime around 2008 or maybe earlier). The fact that they’re teaching you exactly how they went about building Freckle (now changed name) to generate million(s) of dollars in revenue between two people is a testament to the method(afaict its very much a methodical approach) of starting with the audience, finding the pain, building a solution (I think it’s more than just that). I seem to remember they recommend a ladder up style approach where you build some assets and sell those first..
They have had a few big hitter success stories early on and probably many more success stories since.
That all said, at the end of the day, many have gone it alone and succeeded so maybe just read the blog posts and see if it looks like it might be good for you.
I don't think it's the only course in the world worth that cost. I've spent more on purely technical courses, on (human) language courses and even on mostly worthless accredited university courses! I'm a fan of investing in education generally.
In this case, the ROI is very clear. It was worth it because I've already recouped what I spent on it and I expect to earn more from it in the future.
There are really too many differences to count, but the big ones are:
:)