Should I launch my paid course now using the waitlist or wait for my channel to grow, and should I use a lifetime founding cohort price or a locked monthly rate?
I think your most enthusiastic buyers are the ones you should target with high‑lifetime‑value plans. You can offer a day‑one lifetime price, an annual plan, or similar. If you have a group of people who really love you, give them the option to pay more than casual fans—that's good business sense. You can invite people you know or have loose business relationships with. For example, when I launched Maker School, I went on Twitter, looked at people in my DMs, and texted them: "Do you want to help me with my group? I just launched this thing that will help you do X, Y, Z, and I want some eyeballs. Are you game?" They responded positively and became my founding cohort, and I still check in with some of them. As for timing, you’ve already announced your launch, so you should go ahead and launch. However, 1.5k subs isn’t enough for me to feel comfortable monetizing; I’d wait until I have around 10‑20k subs. People often don’t realize that monetization slows growth. Once you start charging, the growth rate typically drops because you’ve moved from a free‑to‑grow phase to a paid phase. That trade‑off is the price you pay for revenue. Hopefully that makes sense.
So you said you're offering a free trial for 6 weeks, then moving to a monthly plan if they like it. I'll be honest—that's not a good way to pitch automations; you've done it, so you'll have to live with it. But think about it from their perspective: this is fear‑based because you get them used to the system for six weeks and then threaten to take it away unless they pay. I don't like operating that way. I prefer people to fall in love with the value so much they want to pay me hand over fist. Here's how I'd do it: offer the system build for free, and only if they absolutely love it would I ever ask them to pay. Then I'd make them love it so much that the natural question becomes, 'Hey Nick, how can I pay you?'—and I'd have them start that conversation with me, not wait until the end of a six‑week period. In terms of pricing, it's hard to give a exact number, but consider: how much money were they making before? How much are they making with the system? What's the opportunity cost of the leads they're missing? How much more money do you think they'd make with the system versus without it? How much time would you be saving them? Add all that up into a value number, then charge maybe a third or a quarter of that. For example, saving 15 hours a week is one part of the value—but it's not just about time savings. There's actually a lot more that goes into a system's value. If you notice, I listed time as one of the last value components. Fifteen hours a week at $50/hour is only $750 a week. But because we gained three more leads this week and the average lead value is $1,000, that's $3,000—four times the time‑savings value. That kind of 4× differential between front‑end and back‑end value is typical. Thank you, Builder Tutorials and Techul—much appreciated. Okay, I think I'll leave it there; hopefully this makes sense.
Fausto RDS says, 'Nick, how would you to about growing an audience starting from zero? I'm thinking Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. My ICP are service businesses, home services, and I sell custom software and automations. I got a lot of people asking questions like, how do I start my own brand and what's the best way to build an audience? Cuz they look at the way that I built my audience and they're like, well, Nick obviously puts a lot of time, effort, and care into it, so um you know, he'll he'll know. But I'll be honest, I just I just tried 10 different approaches and then I found one that happened to work. Um I did not come with like a highly strategic approach. What I did was I simply asked myself, what provides me the lowest CPMs, costs per meeting? >> [gasps] >> Which platform, if I test it for 30 to 60 to 90 days, will get me the lowest CPMs uh comparatively? And it turns out it was YouTube. So, rather than start at the end, which you're doing right now, which is growing an audience and starting from zero, start at the beginning, which is, hm, why do I want to grow an audience? Well, I work in the home service businesses uh niche. My current CPMs are $45. And that's not very scalable because our lifetime values are, you know, at some ratio where the cost of acquiring the customer to the lifetime value just doesn't make sense. So, how can I get lower CPMs? And then, rather than choosing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, like you have here, uh just try a bunch and then determine which ones work after the fact. Pre-commit yourself to some sort of test. Cuz that's what I always do and uh that tends to work pretty well. But yeah, man, it's all 100% just about your cost per meeting, if I'm honest, or your cost per, you know, uh intent. In my case now with Maker School, driving a chunk of my revenue, it's it's cost per intent. It's cost per like, basically, each person visiting my landing page. >> [gasps] >> And that's way better than through cold email.'
You’re running a low‑ticket, low‑touch SaaS that’s mostly automated, so you need a lot of volume to make it worthwhile. Cold outreach—especially cold email—usually isn’t profitable for low‑ticket products because the average revenue per user is too low to justify the sales effort required for each lead. A half‑hour sales call for a $49 annual plan simply doesn’t break even. You have a few options: target enterprise customers with larger seat counts, or focus on paid acquisition like PPC. If CPA is high, either lower it with better marketing tactics or raise your price point. Remember, the goal isn’t necessarily a low CPA; it’s to be profitable after a few months. You’ll likely lose money for the first 3‑4 months of a user’s lifecycle, so you need churn under about 20 % monthly to break even. Once churn extends to 6‑12 months, the model becomes sustainable. In short, for a low‑ticket SaaS, prioritize paid ads and consider raising prices or moving upmarket rather than relying on cold outreach. The only real value of a tool today is its distribution channel, so focus on getting it in front of as many eyes as possible.
Yeah, that sounds like a lot of work—don’t build it first. Sell the concept before you invest time in development. Find the best way to pitch what you’ve written, then create nine variations to test the messaging. Reach out to a cold‑email audience, sending about a hundred pitches per offer each day for a month. By the end you’ll know which messaging resonates. Only when you get a bite should you start building the actual system or template; start with outreach, not development. (He then shares his channel stats: his main channel is at 72,629 subscribers, Instagram around 93k, with a standout growth day showing 1.32% increase on the main channel, 4.36% on Instagram, and 3.27% on daily updates. He notes losing his voice from a loud boat ride but emphasizes that this was his biggest growth day in a long time. Over the past month and a half, he’s only had two such standout days, and he just experienced one. He also mentions that his Maker School churn is down to 17%, a 5% reduction from the strategy he implemented live, which saved him roughly $150k on a $120k/month product—equivalent to making $705k instead of $545k if churn had stayed high.)