How to successfully sell an online course with jazz pianist Michael Clement

Michelle Lynne: Hey everybody and welcome back to the Fearless Artist Podcast. My name is Michelle Lin and I’m your host, and today I’m really happy to have Michael Clement on, who’s going to be sharing with us his process of how he built his own digital channel course.

Michael Clement: So excited to be here. I’m glad to be able to share some of my story with everyone. I’ve been following Michelle’s Instagram for quite some time. So great to connect and talk about what I’ve been working on.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, I mean, Instagram is such a great place because I found you and then saw your great content about your course, and we started talking a little bit about it. And I think I was most interested in having you on because a lot of our fearless artists, mastermind clients, or people in our membership, fast forward, they’re all saying, okay, I understand now the concept of “I don’t want to trade time for money anymore.” Teaching private lessons — I got full at, you know, 30, 40 kids. It’s draining me. It’s exhausting. Let’s move to a digital course, and we’re like, yeah, that’s a great idea. And it just, it seems like it’s really hard for a lot of people to get going, to get it off the ground. So I wanted to hear about you because you’ve successfully created and launched and are selling. And one of the first things you told me was that you were already profitable. So that’s what we love to hear. We love to hear about musicians making money and help our musicians make more money, make more income streams, and free up their time. And I…

Michael Clement: Yeah. And I would say the first thing is that this isn’t my first attempt at a course or a product. I’m probably several iterations in. I did a group program for a while, I was selling, you know, private lesson packages for a while. And I still teach privately and I still teach in a group setting, but the course, which is called…

Michelle Lynne: Which is called the Jazz Piano Launchpad.

Michael Clement: Uh, thank you. Yeah. It really came out of some failures that I had with trying to do a group program. And I think, you know, some of the lessons that I learned, if I did it again, I could definitely make adjustments and definitely fix. But the main shift I had when thinking about how to actually market and launch an online course was thinking that I needed to market it before I actually created it. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing that I see a lot of musicians run into when they want to create a course. They have an idea and they haven’t tested the idea before they actually create the product. And…

Michelle Lynne: Sometimes…

Michael Clement: If you just have a, “Oh, I want to create a course on X topic,” and then you start dreaming about the course, you start thinking about it, and then you start planning out the modules. You haven’t even thought about the problems that you’re trying to solve for a client. So if you can kind of turn the process on its head and say, “I’m going to market this first. I’m going to figure out what problems I’m solving, what quantifiable end result or clear endpoint I want to create for my client.” When you kind of turn that process on its head and then create the course after you’ve created all the marketing materials, you can be a lot more successful. So I may have jumped a little bit too far, but it’s probably like the main thing.

Michelle Lynne: Maybe you can start with, okay, because I hear you. You’ve got an idea for a course. Um, one of our mastermind girls right now, she’s got this course for easy piano adults, easy for adult beginners. Um, so, you had your idea. Can you tell us a bit, like, you know, what is your course? What do you teach in it? What does it look like?

Michael Clement: So my course is specifically for classical pianists. I say in most of my marketing, I just say pianists generally, but it’s for those that already play the piano well, they already read sheet music, and they want to be able to play with a jazz band, get to the point where they can go to a jam session and be confident playing jazz at that jam session in eight weeks. I had to kind of put blinders on my ideas for the course because I have, you know, years of knowledge that I could put into a course, but when you’re creating a course, you have to put blinders on it and think, who is this for? What’s the starting point? What’s the ending point? And how can I create a bridge from that, from the beginning to the end in the clearest and most effective way possible?

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, that’s so helpful because so many musicians have tons of ideas and they want to pour all of their expertise and education into this course because they also want to make it really valuable, and you want to say, okay, I want to sell it for a high rate because I’m trying to make some money here. So that means I need to give everything. And then I think with marketing, it’s harder to find your specific target audience because a lot of people don’t want to be overwhelmed. You know, I’m a classical pianist, I want to learn how to play some jazz. That’s a very specific type of person, and you can’t dump everything you know on them or else they’re going to be overwhelmed and maybe not advise. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your education up until making the…

Michael Clement: Course? Yeah, for sure. And I guess I didn’t do a full intro of myself, but I grew up taking classical piano lessons. My mom taught me when I was like four, and I grew up with a very traditional piano background. I did festivals and competitions and federation and all these different things. And I just always enjoyed creating my own music. And this continued throughout my teenage years. I never had a jazz instructor. I always took from classical teachers. And even in high school, I took very serious classical lessons from one of my great mentors, Lenore Brown at the University of Utah. And then I did the audition circuit for my undergrad, and I ended up going to University of North Texas for classical piano, and that was where I got scholarships. And when I went for my audition, I was like, “Oh, by the way, I also want to do jazz piano.” So I was auditioning for both. But frankly, my audition was stronger for the classical side, but I always wanted to do… I had this plan that I was going to do dual major. I was going to do classical piano and jazz piano, and I was able to do that at the University of North Texas. And that was great for me, and kind of in the process of doing my undergrad, I realized I think that I enjoy the work for jazz piano better than I enjoyed the work for classical piano.

Michelle Lynne: Jazz people are just cool, right? It sounds like you just wanted to hang out with the cool people.

Michael Clement: That was probably it. I didn’t have many… I didn’t have many friends on the classical piano side.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, because they’re all busy practicing. They shut themselves in their practice…

Michael Clement: Yeah. And I did the same, but it was like on one side, I didn’t have any friends, and it was like, “Learn and memorize 20 minutes of jury music every semester.” And then on the other side, it was like, “Hey, we’re doing concerts.” I started gigging my sophomore year, and I really enjoyed it. And so I kind of throughout my undergrad was straddling the two because I had a full ride for classical piano, so I still had to really perform on the classical side, but I was frankly more focused on the jazz side as well.

Michelle Lynne: Um, no, it’s great to have, to have that inclusion of both genres so early in your training, because normally, from what I’ve seen, is people have to really choose and focus. And this has led to you being able to approach both target audiences. “Hey, classical pianist, let me teach you how to be cool. Let me teach you how to gig.” You know, maybe this is your new marketing strategy. Okay, so you come out of your undergrad? And then when do you think you started teaching, and then you started group programs, you said, and that wasn’t as successful?

Michael Clement: Yeah, so I started teaching in my undergrad. Even at the time I was gigging, I got some referrals from professors that were like, “Hey, I’ve got the student. You know, take from him.” So I started with going house to house. I had a very small, like three or four students. I would just go house to house, and I took an entrepreneurship class, and one of my teachers was like, “You should not be charging $30 for a lesson that’s, you know, 40 minutes long, that you’re driving to their houses.” And I was like, huh, I’d never considered that before. And so, at some point, I said, “Okay, everyone gets to come to me, and I’m raising my rates.” And from that point forward, it was like, okay, this is a serious thing. If I’m going to raise my rates and they’re going to come to me, this has to be legit. And so this is like even sophomore year, junior year of my undergrad, I continued my master’s at the same school. So I continued building my studio. And then after I finished my master’s, that was about the time I got married. And there wasn’t any external pressure, but there was definitely some internal pressure of like, “Oh, like I’m married now.” My wife works and is great, but at the same point it was like, well, at some point it’s possible that one of us could be more employed than the other one. And so I need to make this a big focus. At that point, I started looking around online and finding, “Okay, how do I make this a more sustainable thing? How can I not only be making $20,000 a year or $30,000 a year, how can I start?” At first, it was just like, how can I make more money? And then I came across these group models where people would say, “Okay, well you’re going to provide a clear value and you’re going to market this high ticket course.” And I went that route. And, you know, it actually did work for quite some time. My program was called The Complete Pianist. And the idea of the program was for classical pianists to learn how to play by ear and to arrange their own music. And it was a 16-week course, and I was marketing it for $2,000. And I was running a Facebook funnel or a Facebook group funnel. And I think the biggest thing there is that I didn’t consider, and probably the biggest mistake I made, is that I was considering the price of, or the value of the transformation — which is what you should be doing — but I wasn’t considering a very crucial variable that I think anyone who is creating courses should always consider, which is the certainty that the person has that they will be successful with your program.

Michelle Lynne: Oh my gosh. I hear, yes, so good because you know, people need to know you like you trust you, but they also need to trust themselves if they’re going to take a $2,000 course. They need to say, “I know that I’m gonna put the time into this. I have time to practice, I’m gonna be able to understand the material.” Like, if they have any self-doubt about their capacity, it has nothing to do with you or your expertise or if you can teach them. And that’s what we see too with our mastermind. We know that they believe that we say we can help them, but sometimes the doubt comes from, they don’t know if they have the gumption or the energy to put in day after day. Right?

Michael Clement: Yeah. And so I launched this group program, or this program, it started off as one on one, and I tried to make it a group program. And I actually had quite a few enrollments at the beginning when I started out. There were all these people who came out of the woodworks that already knew me, and they knew how serious I was, and, not to toot my own horn, but how good of a teacher I was. And they just came out of the woodwork and they were like, “Yeah, I want to study with you.” And they worked with me, and they were great, and it was awesome. But the next step of going online and creating a community of people that liked me and trusted me as much as these people that had known me for several years was much harder. And then the additional crucial bit of information is, that I wasn’t considering in the price of the course was, you know, how likely are they, or how likely do they think they are that they will be successful? And so kind of after I had… I did a big launch. I prepared probably two months for this launch, preparing all my email sequences. I did a three-day masterclass for free in my Facebook group. And all of that said and done, I got one client.

Michelle Lynne: Oh. Oh, my heart just shattered. That sucks so much. I’m so sorry that happened.

Michael Clement: It was, and I’m…

Michelle Lynne: A three-day free masterclass. Oh, that’s so much work. I just… I feel you because I know how much work you just described. I’m like, I’ve never spent three months on a launch. I know. I can’t imagine…

Michael Clement: Yeah. And it was my first launch. And so there were probably some bugs and…

Michelle Lynne: Sounds like you were very thorough in preparation.

Michael Clement: I hired a coach to help me, to help me with, I invested in this coach to help me with this launch. And I prepared all the materials and it was a lot of work. And at the end of it, I had probably 20 people come to my masterclass. Then a lot of them were other jazz musicians who wanted to know how I taught this thing.

Michelle Lynne: Oh, jeez.

Michael Clement: I mean, I’m sure there were a lot of things that I would do differently if I could do it again. But there were a lot of hard lessons. So after that launch, I said, “Okay, we’re not doing this anymore. I can’t do this anymore.” So I said, “Well, what’s something that I can clearly do?” I’m going to go this online course route. About the next year, which I had that launch, it was about a year ago, July. So it’s been, I don’t know, 13, 14 months or something like that. But since that time, it’s been, “Okay, how can I do this, this online course?” And as I was doing my research on how to create and launch this course, part of the main thing was that I learned, and this is also from, if any of you are familiar with Russell Brunson’s book Dotcom Secrets, highly recommend it. One thing he talks about is that you want the price of your product to be a tenth of the value of the thing that you are selling. You want it to be so valuable that people would just be crawling over each other to get to your offer. After that launch, I decided to start fresh. I was going to start with a new idea, a new course idea. I decided to niche down a little bit rather than just pianists learning to improvise and play by ear. I started the idea for the course, and then along the way, I got some mentorship. And one of the main things I learned was what I said at the beginning, which is that I should prepare the marketing materials before I finished the course. And so I had already started teaching this curriculum that I was creating one on one, and so I started creating some videos around it. I started building up an outline of the course. And then in June of this year, I launched. I did my pre-launch, so the course wasn’t even done. Arguably, all you need is a welcome video and then a very clear idea of how you’re going to create it. Then you create all the marketing materials, and in every landing page, everything you say, “This is a pre-launch.” But you create everything around your marketing materials, and then once you know that the idea is valuable, then you finish it.

Michelle Lynne: So, okay. For all our musicians who are listening and they don’t understand all these marketing terms, so just for in layman’s terms, you started your marketing materials. So you’re talking about your course, you’re talking about your idea, you’re making videos, you’re posting on Instagram, and this course isn’t even recorded yet. Like, how do you navigate this mind of like, I can, I can hear so many people going, “Oh, do you even do that?”

Michael Clement: Yah… so it’s all about doing your market research, meaning that I’m talking to people, I’m finding out their struggles with learning jazz piano. What are the biggest roadblocks that they have when they’ve tried learning jazz in the past? And what I found is that many people had tried books. They had tried doing YouTube. Of course, these are very common things. You know, “I’ve tried this, I’ve tried that.” They were overwhelmed with the complexity of jazz piano. And then they were also overwhelmed with the prospect of improvisation. And so I knew that whatever solution I created, it needed to not be overwhelming in terms of theory. It needed to be slow, and it needed to be, at least in the way that I teach, it needed to be very step-by-step, very easy. And I knew that when we got to the improvisation parts, um, cause there’s a whole chapter on soloing, I knew that I needed to create a very clear way for people to be able to improvise without feeling very overwhelmed. And so I did the market research. I found out what are the problems that I’m going to solve. How can I actually solve those problems?

Michelle Lynne: And, did you just start DMing classical pianists on Instagram, or how are you finding people?

Michael Clement: Yeah. I started talking to my friends. I started talking to teachers around. I’ve got a friend who’s a trumpet player whose dad was a Cliburn silver medalist. And, yeah. He comes to my gig because I gig with his son and I talk to him. I’m like, you know, “Why haven’t you ever learned how to improvise?” And he still is never going to do it. He says he never will. He’s like, “Oh yeah, I just can’t do what you do.” And so I just… every chance you have to talk with someone who you’re wanting to serve, you find out what’s the thing that’s holding you back. And then you create the course around that if that makes sense. Cause if you just think, “Well, I’m gonna teach this.” Not only is it so much information, you could teach anything if you were just like, “Well, I’m going to create a theory course.” But when you get really clear on who you’re going to serve, and then you actually talk to these people and see what they’ve tried before, why it didn’t work, then when you actually turn around to create the course, you have a much, a much better direction.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, I love this language that you’re using around serving people. That’s something that Deanna and I have done a lot, where who are the musicians that we’re called to serve? It’s helped us enormously getting comfortable with the sales part of what we do, which is basically inviting people into our mastermind, into our membership. In the beginning, it was like, “Oh, but they’re our friends. How can we get money from them?” You know, we’re really stuck in that. And it’s like, we’re serving them by providing them solutions to their problems, like you’re actually being generous and helping people. And I can imagine so many musicians getting stuck in like, “Oh, I don’t want to make a course, then I got to sell it.” But it’s more about like, I love what you’re saying. Who are you called to serve? What is holding them back? What are the solutions that you have that are going to help these people? And then you can just tell them about it and see if they can enroll. I’d love for you to expand on when you say testing the idea, what does that look like practically? Like you go in one direction and then you see it’s not hitting or you’re testing by having conversations with people?

Michael Clement: So the ultimate test is when someone will pull out their credit card and pay. That is the test. I have some organic following, but I didn’t, I don’t have a large organic following. So I decided I was going to go the paid ads route. I don’t know if your audience is familiar with the term of a funnel, but it’s like you’re inviting people into your world and you have one pathway for them to go from seeing your first thing to seeing your second thing and then eventually buying your product. You don’t want to have any way that they can get lost along the way. And so, for me, my funnel currently is they see an ad on Facebook, cause I’m running Facebook ads, and then they click on the ad and they go onto my landing page. The landing page doesn’t have, it doesn’t have a menu. It doesn’t have anything. It just has ideas. They look at all my testimonials, they look at what exactly is in the course, what unique things do I solve in the course that they’ve never seen anywhere else. And then, as soon as they say, “Gosh, I’m convinced. I want to enroll in this,” and it’s only $197 at the time of recording this video, by the way. And then, if they’re convinced, they click the enroll now, and then it brings them to a sales page. I’m sure that anyone has experienced this as a consumer before, but creating it yourself… this is what I didn’t have when I did my group program. I didn’t have a funnel. I didn’t have an easy way for people to say, “Oh, I want to learn more about this course. Okay. I’m going to sign up for this mailing list,” which is another type of funnel.

Michelle Lynne: I think I have a lot of people lost in my mailing list funnel right now, because I started this quiz that took me forever to figure out “how fearless are you?” And I also am attempting to run Facebook ads, but I think that those are going wrong too. So anyway, we finally have all these people doing this quiz, and a bunch of them didn’t finish it because I guess the questions were too hard or people get bored. So I’m like constantly testing and trying new questions and stuff. So I understand what you’re saying about testing. And then they finally get on the mailing list, and I’m supposed to be nurturing them and welcoming them into the family. And I think I’ve only written two of the emails, and a bunch of them are stuck just sitting there. Okay. You’re mentioning creation. This is another place where a lot of musicians get stuck, like the tech overwhelm. It’s so confusing. So how did you go from, because your video is super high quality, your landing page looks great. I mean, the whole tech aspect of you, it was very… I almost enrolled. I was like convinced. I mean, I was just like, “I’m just trying to figure out if I should have this guy on my podcast.” And I’m like, “Maybe I need the course. The course looks…”

Michael Clement: Thank you. Yeah. I’m assuming they’re seeing video and not only audio because we’re recording. I knew that because obviously I got everything ready. You should see the difference between my chapter 1 and my chapter 7, because the course is currently 7 chapters. You should see the difference. It’s pretty stark how big of a difference. There was a point between chapter three and chapter four when I wisened up. I got some help, I did some research, and my videos got better, but it wasn’t at the beginning. You don’t need it to get going. Yeah. Eventually, you want to learn it, but you learn it piece by piece. First I worked on my lighting, just having enough lighting. And then it was, eventually it was like, okay, well, I think it’s about time that I can get a new camera, but it wasn’t at the beginning, and you don’t need it at the beginning. Honestly, you don’t need it at all. If you have a good window that has some good natural light, just set up your camera, put a keyboard if you’re teaching piano classes, and go from there.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah. Thanks for saying this because people get so overwhelmed. I mean, even in our six-week sprint, which is for social media, I tell them all the time, like, “You want to see where we started? Just scroll back. It’s all still there.” Four years ago, Michelle, everything you’re saying, natural lighting, getting a tripod, stability, learning where to look at the lens, learning how to articulate, how to communicate better. I mean, the problem is musicians are comparing themselves to people who are like you. You’re way down the line. You’ve got experience, and they’re like, “Well, I just want to get started.” You know, what would you say to those people who have this course idea? They’re talking to their friends or testing it out, but then they get overwhelmed with comparing themselves to other people and wondering if their idea is good enough, all this…

Michael Clement: Well, the first thing is that the message is the most important part. It’s not your tech. It’s not any of that. I think, you know, go into it with the mindset of “I’m going to learn one thing at a time.” Yes, we live in a video world. Video is king right now. Even though we’re musicians, if you only do audio, you can only go so far. But don’t go into it with the thought of like, “Oh, I can’t get started because I don’t know what I’m doing.” Just think about it as like, what is the bottleneck? By bottleneck I mean what is the thing that’s holding me back from getting to the next step? Is it my messaging? There’s a ton of people that are very successful and they have very, what I might consider to be, less professional video setups, but they’re incredibly successful because their messaging is right. They know who they’re serving. They know all of that. And then the second thing is that the solutions you get to help with some of these things are individually not as expensive as you’d think. And so you can get some very inexpensive options that can help you get started. And I’m just looking at the… I’m going to grab it. I’ve got this, like, this random thing that I put my phone on my chest. The reason I bring that up is because those posts that you were seeing on my Instagram, I batched 19 posts in 2 hours of filming. Right. And then editing probably took me another two hours, but I started like taking it on, taking it off, because I was like, “Oh, this is going to be distracting.” And then I was like, forget it. I just need to get this done. So, you know, that little tool, probably like 20 bucks, and I put my phone on it and then people can see what I’m playing and I don’t have to have a hand tied up.

Michelle Lynne: No, it makes perfect sense. You’re just finding things that work and you’re using the tech that you have available to you and you keep going, right? That’s what I’m hearing.

Michael Clement: Exactly. Yeah. We build the plane while we fly it, which sounds scary, but that’s really what it feels like.

Michelle Lynne: I’d love for you to talk a little bit about the creator platform that you use, cause I did check them out, and they seem…

Michael Clement: Awesome. Yeah. So the, and I think this is a testament to very good marketing and kind of even… I guess I should introduce it first. Last Black Friday, I saw a sale for a course that was going to help me improve my video. And I was like, “Okay, I have this idea for this jazz piano course. I’m going to go ahead and buy this course.” It was $47. And I guess you don’t have examples of my previous video, but it created this look. The course was $47, and, you know, you can get a fully professional lighting setup for a couple hundred bucks. I’ll say $300 to make it a little bit more realistic, but, and then after I took their course, got my video looking like this basically, then they had me in their funnel. Like, I was sold. It was such a great value going back to the idea of having your product to be worth 10 times what you’re charging for it. I got such an amazing value from this course on video creation. It’s called 14 Day Filmmaker. I said, “Gosh, if all of your products are like this, I want every single one.” And so I went ahead and bought their course, which is called 30 Day Course Creator. And I got a non-sale. I think if you just like hop on their website, it’s like $997 or something like that, but I was an existing client and they were running a special. And so I got it for $400 or whatever.

Michelle Lynne: So what did they do that helped you overcome anything that was holding you back? What was keeping you stuck by the way?

Michael Clement: I think I just needed a very clear thing to follow. I needed a very clear plan, and it was… it’s incredibly comprehensive. They teach you how to do Facebook ads, they teach you how to… which is obviously not the first thing. They teach you how to do the market research, they teach you how to do the product market fit. So basically figuring out how much should I charge for this product? Who am I serving? What can they afford? How would they perceive this product? They help you do that in the course, and then once you have all of your materials together for your landing page and your ads, then they teach you how to do Facebook ads. So it’s incredibly comprehensive. And then after I finished, after I pre-launched, and it was a successful pre-launch, then I signed up for their mastermind.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah. I mean, when you find something that works, you need to keep investing. I think that’s what keeps you going and get the momentum that you need. And so tell me again, just for everybody, like you pre-launched the course, that means that you’ve made…

Michael Clement: Sales. Yes. Yeah, so I pre-launched the course, meaning I hadn’t finished the course materials, but I was selling it essentially. I was running Facebook ads, seeing if this is a viable product.

Michelle Lynne: When somebody buys the course and it’s not fully done yet, then you’ve just given them a date of…

Michael Clement: Yeah.

Michelle Lynne: At that kind of point.

Michael Clement: Yeah. I had actually gone a little bit further than they even say that you need to. I had over half the course done at that point, and I’m marketing it as an eight-week course. So I said everything for the first four weeks is already available, and the rest of the course will be made available starting this date.

Michelle Lynne: And then people just understand, and you haven’t got any angry emails like…

Michael Clement: It’s very clear. And every time you drop something, I have a community where people can post their assignments. Every time I drop a new chapter or a new lesson, I say, “Hey, you know, chapter five is live,” or “chapter six is ready to go.” And even when I was done with chapter seven, which is the last chapter, I said, “Okay, well now the main bulk of the course is done, but as you go through it, please give me your feedback. Happy to add more videos if you have questions.”

Michelle Lynne: That is so smart because then people feel so valued because you’re literally listening to them. You’re creating a product that they’re asking for. So, you know, if you can find one person who needs it, you can find 10. And from what you told me before the call, you’ve been really successful with your…

Michael Clement: Sales. Yeah, so even when I pre-launched, I got like 14 or 15 sales, and a small handful of them were organic. You know, I made a couple posts on my Facebook profile. And then I stopped ads for a while after I did the pre-launch, which I probably didn’t need to, but in terms of just headspace, like I said, “Okay, I’ve had 15 or so sales. I need to finish the course.” And so I turned off the ads and then spent about a month finishing the course. And then I set a date. I said, “Okay, by…” I can’t remember, I think it was September 1st. I think is what it was. By this date, I’m going to have the course finished. And then I had to hire an editor a little bit just to make that deadline to get some help with the editing side of it, but it was finished. And then, you know, right after that September 1st date, I said, “Okay, time to start the ads up again.” So I got some more coaching. I signed up for this mastermind to get more help. And you know, since then, even… we talked before we started recording, we had an initial call about two weeks ago, and since our call together two weeks ago, I’ve made, what did I say? 17 sales.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, 17 sales. Which is amazing. I mean, and the first message that we exchanged, you told me you were profitable. So I’m like, okay, if we have found a musician who’s creating a profitable course, like that means you’ve invested what, like $400 into your content program. You’ve invested into the lighting, because a lot of musicians are scared to spend money up front. Right. And that’s the big thing also with the mastermind with fast forward. We’re trying to explain, like, when you come into these programs, you’re setting goals, you’re going to get more concerts, opportunities, students, you learn things that you haven’t learned before. It accelerates your progress, but there’s always that fear of, I think a lot of musicians view investment as loss. Like, “Oh, I’m going to lose $300 on this course.” It’s like, no, you’ve made 17 plus 15 sales at $200. So like, this is just the beginning for you. And now I’m sure you’ve got different upsells that you’re thinking of. So once they’re in your funnel, just like you experienced with your content creation that you can sell people into, you know, some kind of VIP group, live lessons, whatever it is, whatever your product is going to be. And like, how exciting is that? Because then you’re working with the people that you want to work with, people who already know you and love you from the initial course. And then it’s so much easier to sell to them then because the trust is there. The trust is established. And you have this perfect example with your video course, because you were like, “If all of your products are like this, I…”

Michael Clement: Want everything. Yeah, and that’s kind of the idea of when I was, as they say, ascending up the value ladder, meaning you buy their cheapest product and then you buy their mid-ticket product for a few hundred dollars, and then you buy their mastermind, like you keep going up. And this is just one business model. Not like you have to do this, but that experience for me as a consumer, as I was, I knew I was doing this. And my wife, she’s in marketing too, so she’s in corporate marketing, so different, but she’s like, “They’ve got you in their funnel.”

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, but as…

Michael Clement: Yes.

Michelle Lynne: You’re happy to be.

Michael Clement: And I’m not getting any affiliates. I’m telling people about their products. And hopefully someone will go onto their website, contentcreator.com, and probably get one of their products. And they’re getting free referrals from me because they didn’t charge three, four hundred for their front-end product or their cheapest product. They only did it for $47. And so that’s part of how I decided to change my business model because I said, well, I just want to get… I want to get more people into my ecosystem. I want people to know, like, and trust me. And I want them to do it affordably so that I can have two, three, four hundred people that have taken my course and would happily give me more of their money to get an additional transformation. And I think that mindset has probably been the biggest change is thinking not “How much can I charge for this?” which I think is an important first step for musicians to say, “How much should I be charging?” I think that’s absolutely…

Michelle Lynne: A huge, huge topic. We get this.

Michael Clement: It’s absolutely an important thing and you should do that first. Equally as important is how can I provide an insane amount of value for people that they will say, “How did they charge this little? It was so much.” And it’s even more powerful when you have a one-to-many offer, whether it’s a group program or an online course, because I don’t have to give, you know, the same number of hours per person that takes the course or anything like that.

Michelle Lynne: Exactly. You’re getting out of trading time for money and you can not have a cap on how much you can earn as a musician, which is amazing because we love to see musicians creating income streams for themselves. So congratulations. I mean, this is a huge story. It’s awesome to see how you’ve built, how you’ve tested, you’ve tried, you’ve learned along the way and also for sharing with us today. That’s so, so helpful. So, after this whole story, if you had one thing that you could tell people listening here, where can they start? What’s one step they could take?

Michael Clement: Yeah, I would say, you know, if you have had a course idea in the past, whether it’s for a group program or whether it’s for a completely recorded course, I would write down what that course idea is and try to distill it into the actual problems that you’re solving for people. And have that be the starting point for your idea rather than just, you know, the topic that you want to teach. So, you know, by having a very clear idea of the problems that you’re solving, you’ll be able to not only serve people better, but they will be much more willing to invest their time and money with you.

Michelle Lynne: And they’ll see a greater success because you’re actually solving where they are stuck. And when you can get them past that bump, then they’re going to be on their way. No, that’s great. My course idea is killing perfectionism in classical. So I think I’m helping musicians overcome fear, resistance, overthinking, all of that stuff. So I have a lot to think about. Thank you for this episode. How can people find you? How can we…

Michael Clement: Follow you? Yeah, of course. So, my Instagram, I would check that out first. That’s @MichaelClementMusic. And then if you want to find out more about my Jazz Piano course, you can find it in the link in bio at my Instagram. But you can go directly to find out more about the course at learn.michaelclement.com or michaelclementmusic.com. And I’m sure you’ll have my name spelled out in the show notes.

Michelle Lynne: We’re going to blast it everywhere. Thank you so much, Michael, for your time. This is so helpful. Everybody who’s listening, feel free to reach out to Michael for any questions. I’m sure he’d love to give you feedback, and you can hear more about what he’s done on his Instagram. Ok, great… thanks for being here Michael

Michael Clement: Thank you.