Once you’ve run your first cohort you’ve built your offer.

But you haven’t yet built a business. Let’s go ahead and scale up.

Let’s get started:

Once the dust has settled from your first cohort make sure to celebrate a little.

Had fun? Ok good back to work!!

If the first cohort went well and you helped your customers achieve their goal (you did right??) then we can scale.

Didn’t manage this? Go again. Don’t scale something that doesn’t work.

We’re going to repeat the process but each time nudge up the pricing. We can do this because each time we run the cohort we’ll get more evidence than this works.

Let’s gather up that evidence!

Testimonials

First up and simplest.

We want to get testimonials from each and every member of our first cohort.

I personally use Senja to collect testimonials because it makes it super simple for my customers. They can give a text or video testimonial. You want both.

If necessary incentivise the testimonial - “fill this in by this date and I’ll send you X”

Alternatively, and this one is powerful, offer a testimonial for them.

You’ve just taught them something powerful right? If you’ve done a good job (this the point of the cohort so you better have!) then give them a testimonial talking about their skills.

Just do a straight swap here - you give me a testimonial and I’ll do one for you.

Do whatever it takes to get the testimonial and the adorn your next sign up page with those bad boys!

Case studies

A step up the social proof ladder is a full case study.

Choose a handful of your most successful customers and interview them for a case study.

Ideally hop on a video call and record it all or alternatively send them a survey.

To generate the questions use this prompt under your cohort structure:

Prepare a set of 10 questions I can ask a successful student after the cohort in order to generate a case study
The case study is for marketing purposes to help me acquire new customer
Base the questions on the structure, problems solve, outcomes

This will use the actual course content to come up with a set of questions to ask students:

Collect up their answers via an interview or survey form. Then drop them back into ChatGPT to convert it all into a one page case study. You can straight up drop that on your website or shoot videos about it.

Want to get really fancy? Compile a handful into a small booklet and give them away as a lead magnet.

Second cohort

Once you’ve got social proof about the successes you just had it’s time to roll into the second cohort.

Good news; this will be easier AND more profitable. Great combination!

You’ve done the work now with your first cohort. That process helped you build the product. Running it the second time is much easier. You know the structure, you know the content, you know the blocks customers will hit.

Even though running it again is easier for you you are going to charge more.

If you charged $1500 first time then second time you are going to charge $3000.

We can do this because we now have proof. We have testimonials. We have case studies. This allows us to more confidently charge closer to the full value of the cohort.

This is aligned with the overall method. Always testing and pushing forward once we know the market will support us.

We started lower because we were building alongside our first cohort. We nailed their experience so we have proof. And then we start to increase the price each time we launch.

Evergreen

Once we’ve run the cohort enough times and find that the content is settling into a groove we can go ahead and solidify it into a product or course.

This is optional - but it allows you to scale outside of your time constraints. By converting into a product you can sell at anytime to any number of people. You aren’t in the cycle of launching and running cohorts.

It’s very appealing. But make sure to run enough cohorts to genuinely perfect the material! Don’t automate before it’s ready.

Because as soon as you solidify into a product the material becomes immutable. You lose the flexibility of creating live on the fly with your customers. So it had better be damn good before it’s made static.

Hybrid model

One alternative is to sell both life cohorts and fixed product versions.

This is a best of both worlds. You can have (for example) quarterly cohorts set at a high price ($3k++ depending on niche) as well as an evergreen product version.

The main difference is access to you and your team. That comes in the life version with live calls, Q&As and other hands on help. Whilst the fixed product version is just the material.