Compound Confidence

Wow, I remember a the beginning of the year thinking about how crazy it would be if we had 100 students sign up for our course, and now we are already there!

This was not an easy challenge for us. Online courses are a bit of an odd product in some regards. This is because a customer has to put in a lot of work to get a lot out of it. So getting them to sign up can be difficult because while many people know learning is a worthwhile investment it also requires a lot of energy.

Overall, we got people to sign up in a pretty brute force manner. I would message people on Facebook, chat with friends, and give presentations when I could (I was in school so this wasn't too difficult to do).

Then I started partnering with a few clubs on campus, giving them a commission for promoting our course. We have a free version of our course, so often times even if we didn't get a sale from these promotions, we could still get a free sign up.

It was this combination that lead to the 100 student mark. I am excited to see how we get the next 100!

Also, I want to point out that we did not make a 100 sales. We have made about 10 sales so far. However, just having 100 students in our school is something we are very happy about.

We made the first sale of our personal finance course! Personal finance is a passion of mine and I was tired of the fluffy financial literacy courses out there that never really dug into the important stuff and were always trying to sell you a product on the side (apologies if people have found high quality personal finance courses, if you have, please share them!).

So we decided to build our own. We had about 30 students pilot the course before we launched who were giving us feedback as we built.

While the feedback was good, having someone actual pay money for the course would be something surreal.

Two days after launching, we made our first sale! Sure, we had a huge launch discount and it was to someone I knew, but I was still excited to see that someone actually believed in us and our product enough to purchase the course.

Everybody has got to start somewhere, so I am glad we got this first sale done quickly.

After 1.5 years of going from concept to product, we officially launched Compound Confidence!

This required me working approximately an hour a day, but overall I am happy we have reached this point.

This was my first ever product launch and I had no idea what I was doing. I did some research, made the Facebook and LinkedIn pages, invited people, emailed people, and went from there.

When I launched I didn't even know about IH or Hacker News, but over the past month being a part of the community I have learned a lot.

I look forward to hopefully connecting with more people in the IH community and seeing how our products grow!