The argument in one line.
The course business model is permanently dead due to free YouTube content and AI that can do the work instead of teaching people to do it, so successful information publishers must pivot to selling AI tools trained on their IP, offering services, or building convention events.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You built a 6-7 figure info product business (courses, certifications, memberships) and are seeing sales decline or stagnation over the past 12-24 months.
- A content creator or educator with an established audience and intellectual property who wants to understand what replaces the course model in a saturated market.
- You run a digital marketing agency or education company and are considering a pivot away from course sales but don't know what the replacement revenue streams are.
SKIP IF…
- You're still in growth mode with your course business and haven't yet experienced the saturation and sales decline this breakdown addresses.
- You're interested in how to BUILD a course from scratch or optimize an existing course that's performing well — this is about why the model itself is broken, not how to execute it.
- You operate in a niche market (certification, compliance, specialized B2B training) where courses remain a viable business model and haven't faced the commoditization Deiss describes.
The full version, fast.
The course business model is structurally broken: YouTube saturated the supply of free instruction and AI convinced buyers they can skip learning entirely and just have the work done, which is why one eight-figure education company saw sales collapse to 20% of prior levels. The replacement play treats your business as a publishing company with four monetization paths � premium content, advertising, events, and licensing � and pivots course IP into AI assistants, GPTs, prompt packs, or productized services that deliver the outcome instead of teaching it. To scale toward eight figures, build owned media first, then layer in a convention-style event that becomes the place an industry gathers, expecting three to four unprofitable years before sponsors chase you and ticket-plus-sponsorship revenue splits roughly fifty-fifty.
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00:00hostMatt McGarry
00:34guestRyan Deiss
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:28
01 · Cold open montage
Teaser clips of Ryan's most alarming quotes — drops to 20%, took it down to the studs.
00:28 – 03:32
02 · Why Ryan retired from DigitalMarketer
25-year history of digital publishing, the April 2025 decision to stop investing in new courses, the 'slow and profitable death' framing.
03:32 – 06:37
03 · The real reason course sales collapsed
Three headwinds: post-COVID bubble pop (Clubhouse analogy), YouTube as free-education substitute, AI as the killing blow.
06:37 – 11:54
04 · Why AI beats courses every time
AI doesn't have to be better — just believable enough. People take path of least resistance. If AI can plausibly do the thing, the course is dead.
11:54 – 13:05
05 · The 80% revenue drop
The DM numbers land: dropped to 20% of prior revenue in 12-18 months. Matt contextualizes DM's scale.
13:05 – 16:53
06 · Course business is the wrong frame — it's publishing
Reframing as publishing unlocks century-old business models. Publishers vs authors vs distributors. Category determines who you benchmark against.
16:53 – 21:19
07 · Build your own media first
All monetization paths require owned media. Social to email. Being seen vs being followed. Unique POV driven by unique experience.
21:19 – 22:23
08 · The 4 ways media companies monetize
Advertising, premium content, events, licensing. Most people stuck on #2 (courses).
22:23 – 28:23
09 · Sell AI trained on your IP
Play 1: GPTs/skills/prompt packs built on your course content. DM's actual pivot. Play 2: Productized services — use the AI to deliver the end result for clients. Scalable.co's 12-16 week OS-build engagement.
28:23 – 33:12
10 · Why coaching on top of courses won't save you
New audiences want the end result, not learning. Productized services work because they sell outcomes. Course+calls at 10x only converts existing believers.
33:12 – 35:14
11 · The truth about cohort-based programs
Cohorts are a good addition but not a business model. Feast/famine cash flow, scheduling friction, same fundamental problem as courses.
35:14 – 41:34
12 · The 3 event business models
Expo (trade show), Convention (content+networking, TNC model), Community/sales event (Hormozi workshop model). Each monetizes differently.
41:34 – 48:07
13 · Sponsorships, exhibitors and critical mass
~3,000 attendees before sponsors take you seriously. 50/50 ticket/sponsor split is healthy. Chicken-and-egg years 1-2. Year 3 habit forms, year 4-5 flywheel starts.
48:07 – 58:00
14 · Sponsorship tiers and protecting the stage
Work top-down from presenting sponsor. Approve topic AND speaker for any stage time. Better: build the sponsor's presentation yourself. Coffee sponsors, room naming, booth location as tier levers.
58:00 – 1:01:31
15 · Event programming, activations and wrap-up
45-min sessions with consistent start/stop across stages. Breaks critical for exhibitors. Year 1-2 overspend on what your audience values. Where to find Ryan.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Course sales at a leading digital marketing company dropped to 20% of prior levels — not down by 20%, but to 20%.
- If a consumer believes AI will do what your course teaches them, they will take the AI path every single time.
- AI doesn't need to be better than your course — it just needs to seem good enough to try first, and most people will never come back.
- Stop selling the content you created; train an AI on that content and sell access to the AI instead.
- The publishing industry is a more useful frame for course businesses than 'info products' — and it unlocks completely different business models.
- Courses work until people believe AI will do the thing the course teaches; any skill that reduces to 'generate bits' is now at risk.
- An 8-figure convention event business takes 5 or 6 years to become profitable — the first 3 years, you should expect to lose money or break even.
- Events become the place when people attend because other people are there, not because you marketed it well — that shift takes about 4 years.
- A healthy convention event generates roughly 50% of revenue from ticket sales and 50% from sponsorships.
- Cohort-based courses sit between pure courses and coaching and inherit the scheduling friction of both without solving the core problem: people want the result, not the process.
- Productized services — where the process is identical for every client even if the output is customized — are the most scalable version of a coaching pivot.
- Thirty-minute breaks at events are not wasted time: they are the networking the attendees actually came for.
- The presenting sponsor package should be built first because it defines every deliverable that lower-tier sponsors can subset from.
The course is dead. The publisher is not.
The MCN play
Ryan Deiss just handed you the exact playbook Joe has been building toward: own the media, train the AI on your IP, sell the AI or sell the done-for-you result — never sell the course again.
- Apply the AI diagnostic to every product in your line: could someone reasonably believe ChatGPT will just do this? If yes, pivot now before the market does it for you.
- The 'publishing' reframe is the right identity for MCN+ — not a course platform, a publishing company with AI-enabled products and a services arm.
- The AI-on-IP play is literally what MCN+ should be: take the IP you've built (Direct Response 101, The $6 Stack, etc.), train Claude skills and GPTs on it, sell access to those instead of (or on top of) the course.
- The productized services path is the LFB Line — done-with-you is already in the offer architecture; now AI-enable the delivery so one person can run 10 clients.
- Convention timeline reality-check: if you're building an in-person event, expect 3+ years before sponsors come to you. Invest in attendee experience first, monetization second.
- Use this episode's quotables as content: 'dropped to 20%', 'atoms and not bits', 'AI doesn't have to be better' — three viral hooks already clipped and ready.
Terms worth knowing.
- Info product
- A digital product whose value is the information inside it — courses, ebooks, certifications, training programs — sold as a packaged asset rather than a service.
- GLP-1
- A class of prescription drugs (like Ozempic and Wegovy) originally for diabetes and weight loss that suppress appetite and reportedly dampen compulsive habit loops around food, alcohol, and other consumption.
- GPT (custom)
- A pre-configured version of ChatGPT loaded with specific instructions, knowledge files, or tools so it behaves as a specialist for one task or domain. Creators sell or share access to these for repeatable workflows.
- Claude skill
- A reusable instruction-and-context bundle inside the Claude assistant that turns it into a domain expert for a defined task. Functionally similar to a custom GPT but for the Claude platform.
- Prompt pack
- A curated bundle of prewritten AI prompts for a specific job — writing emails, building ads, analyzing offers — sold or given away so a buyer gets results without learning prompt design.
- Lead magnet
- A free resource — checklist, template, mini-tool — offered in exchange for an email address to start a relationship with a prospective customer.
- Middle-of-funnel content
- Material aimed at people who already know the brand and are evaluating it, designed to deepen interest and move them toward a purchase rather than introduce them cold.
- Productized service
- A done-for-you service packaged with a fixed scope, fixed price, and a repeatable delivery process, so it can be sold and fulfilled almost like a product.
- Cohort-based course
- A course delivered to a group on a fixed schedule with live sessions, deadlines, and peer interaction, rather than a self-paced library a student works through alone.
- Pitchfest
- An event or stage session where speakers spend most of their time selling their own products instead of teaching, often hurting the host event's reputation.
- Expo event
- A trade-show-style event built around a large exhibit floor where buyers and sellers meet. Revenue skews heavily toward exhibitor and sponsor fees rather than ticket sales.
- Convention event
- An event built around stage content and networking, where attendees pay to attend for the sessions and the room of peers. Healthy revenue is roughly half tickets, half sponsorships.
- Convex
- A hybrid event format that combines a convention's content and networking with an expo's trade floor, leaning more toward one side or the other depending on the audience.
- Community event
- A single-stage event where a brand gathers its own audience primarily to sell its products or services from the stage, rather than to monetize through tickets or sponsors.
- Presenting sponsor
- The top-tier event sponsor whose name appears alongside the event title and who receives the largest package of visibility, access, and on-site assets.
- Activation
- A branded experience on an event floor — a giveaway car, a coffee bar, a game station, a meetup — designed to draw attendees, create buzz, and give a sponsor something tangible to attach their name to.
- Ideal client profile
- A precise description of the customer a company most wants to land, used to target outreach, qualify leads, and — at events — match sponsors with attendees worth meeting.
- Owned media
- Audience channels a brand controls directly, like an email list or a membership site, as opposed to rented reach on platforms like Instagram or YouTube where the algorithm decides who sees what.
- BYOK
- Bring Your Own Key — a pricing model where the software is sold or included in a membership, but the customer plugs in their own API key for paid AI services and pays those usage costs directly.
Things they pointed at.
35:14productTraffic & Conversion Summit
49:40productGetScalableLive
51:00productACQ Advantage (Alex Hormozi)
28:23channelCole Gordon
Lines you could clip.
12:00
“They didn't drop by 20%. They dropped to 20%.”
08:34
“AI doesn't have to be better. People just have to believe it's at least as good, and they're gonna do it first because it's already there, it's pretty much free.”
09:15
“Could somebody reasonably believe that AI would just do the thing that you're teaching them to do? And if the answer is yes, your course business is in trouble.”
10:54
“If what you're teaching people to do still needs to be done with atoms and not bits, then I think you still probably have a decent shot.”
54:45
“Stop trying to sell the content. Train AI, sell access to the AI that's been trained on your content.”
14:15
“I looked at it and I said, this is just publishing. That's all that it is.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 11:54denseWhy the course business model collapsed
13:05 – 16:53denseCategory reframe: publishing vs courses
16:53 – 22:23steadyMedia-first strategy and owned audience
22:23 – 33:12denseAI-on-IP and productized services pivots
33:12 – 35:14steadyCoaching, cohorts and premium content variations
35:14 – 41:34denseEvent business models (expo, convention, community)
41:34 – 58:00denseSponsorships, critical mass and convention growth timeline
58:00 – 1:01:31steadyEvent programming and logistics
Word for word.
metaphoranalogy
00:00Those who don't know digital marketer, it's not some rinky dink business. It's been around since 2014.
00:04You and that company have kind of educated an entire generation of marketers, including myself. Our sales for courses and certifications dropped to 20% of what they were over the previous period.
00:14They they didn't drop by 20%. They dropped to 20%. We were willing to take an 8 figure business down to the studs and say every single product we've ever sold, we are no longer selling anymore.
00:25Nobody was buying it as much anymore. Sales had fallen off so dramatically, and we didn't really know how to fix it.
00:34Okay. Ryan, thanks for coming on. I wanna get right into it and talk about your retirement.
00:40So I I think it's about a year ago now you announced you're retiring from creating and selling courses about marketing certifications about marketing. And for those who don't know, you've been doing that for a long time, almost twenty five years with digitalmarketing.com and more.
00:55So what happened? Just walk me through that. Yeah.
00:58I mean, so
00:59I mean, if we go all the way back, I mean, I started my first business from my college dorm room, and I promise I won't take you from then all the way up until now. But but basically, the beginning, I was creating content about what I was doing.
01:11And I was doing this because that was just the culture of the Internet back then. I mean, there was forum culture. If you were doing stuff, you were sharing it.
01:18It was how I was learning. It was how I was building my network. And then at some point, I realized, oh my gosh.
01:23I can sell this stuff stuff that I'm talking about. People will give me money for it, and that's a way that I can actually fund my different business ventures. And so, yeah, you're right.
01:32I mean, I literally have been creating content related to marketing and selling things online since the year 2000. And so, I mean, I went back and I and I looked, and I've been doing it every year since in different formats, and it started out very informal.
01:48I've got this email list. You can sign up for it. All the way up to, you know, hey, maybe we should actually treat this like a real business because it kind of is.
01:57And that was when digitalmarketer.com was formed back in, I think, 2013 maybe, with really just the goal of let's bring all of these disparate products that I have under one roof, under one brand, and then that developed into, you know, let's start offering more professional certifications and things like that.
02:17So I've been doing this basically my entire adult life, but yeah, around about April 2025, realized, and really even before then, realized that this business model isn't working, and we're gonna have to make a really significant pivot and change, and I'd actually decided at the 2025 that we were basically gonna let digital marketer die a slow and profitable death.
02:41We weren't gonna really invest all that heavily in a bunch of new product creation. We were gonna continue serving the members and the customers that we had, but we weren't gonna try to innovate because just nobody was buying it as much anymore.
02:53Sales had fallen off so dramatically, and we didn't really know how to fix it. We ultimately wound up pivoting the business, which we can get into, but yeah, that was the reason that I said, I'm out.
03:04A lot of people thought it was just kind of a marketing gimmick, but here we are. A year later, I still haven't created another marketing course, and
03:11my, you know, the company's better for it. Yeah. I wanna talk about why that happened, because it was that you weren't the only person that this was happening to, that there it's not just marketing courses or marketing certifications.
03:23It's everybody who's selling any type of information product or course or or educational product has felt this impact, I guess, since 2023, 2025.
03:35And that's I kinda wanna part one of our conversation will be about what that impact is, how you're addressing it, how people should. And then part two will be about a little bit of a still related, you know, how to how to build a durable business in this space. So, like, why did the why were sales declining?
03:53What do you see as the the market headwinds that are impacting people who are building media information or education type businesses?
04:01Well, so the first big pullback that we saw was really just the post course business bubble bursting after COVID, because really it was during COVID, when everybody stuck in their house, that this is when we saw just the course business explode.
04:20I mean, I've been, again, in this business in this publishing business for a really long time. I I'd never seen anything quite like what I saw in 2020 and 2021 in in terms of just not just sales skyrocketing, but everybody coming into the market wanting to go and produce their own courses because they realize that everybody's buying things.
04:40So there was sort of like that Clubhouse effect. You remember that app Clubhouse? Yeah.
04:45I mean, the same way that Clubhouse just absolutely fell off a cliff and died because when nobody was when everybody wasn't forced to be inside, they actually wanted to get on and talk to real people. They didn't want to be on a twenty four hour live podcast type thing.
04:59There was a pullback from the course business, and so we saw that. But I just thought, okay, this is kind of temporal. We had a bubble, the bubble burst, it's gonna it kind of came down, but it's gonna go back up.
05:09I've seen this before. I've seen this game before. But it didn't really come back as fast as I thought it was, and the first big reason that that happened I think is simply YouTube.
05:19YouTube is the first major headwind that the course business has seen.
05:25Information has always been out there, it's always been freely available, but the amount of information on YouTube, the quality of information that is available right now today on YouTube is like nothing I've ever seen before, and I think the next phase of consumers of content realized, we can get a lot of this from YouTube, and many of them were YouTube first.
05:46That was where they watched their first video content. Whereas when I first got started, was selling to people who were used to buying books on tape, and I mean literal frickin' cassette tapes. Right?
05:57So that was that was the first big shift that that we saw where I was like, this is gonna be, you know, changing. The next thing though that really hit, obviously, in in 2023 was AI, and that was the ultimate headwind that I realized, you know, okay, this probably isn't gonna come back in some areas.
06:18There's other factors. You you and I have kind of talked about GLP ones and the impact of just, you know, as people are taking some of these drugs, as crazy as that, you know, may sound at first to people, there are a lot of people who buy courses, and they buy them, and they binge them, and it's it's like their drug of choice.
06:39You know, I know I'm kind of that way. Like, I like to buy courses, and I like to binge courses, and I think a lot of the people who are out there buying courses are buying everybody's courses. And just like GLP-1s are really effective at breaking the habit cycle when it comes to food or alcohol or some of these other things, I think it did the same with a lot of people and their course buying habits.
06:57But the biggest ones, and YouTube, AI, without a doubt, biggest headwinds that aren't going anywhere, that aren't going to change anything.
07:04We were talking a couple months ago at New Media Summit about how, you know, it's like AI is not perfect. People, like, they're asked all their business questions.
07:15Does it give them the right answer, the perfect answer, or the complete answer, as well as a great course or program could? Maybe not, but you were saying like people are still choosing that alternative over buying your product. Can you break that down, and like how AI is competing directly against educational products?
07:31Yeah. If the consumer believes
07:34that AI will do the thing that your course is going to teach them to do, they're going to take the AI path every time.
07:44Right? We would always just rather have the thing done for us than learn how to do the thing. Most people.
07:50There are some people who are professional learners, we love to learn, but okay, cool. Once you've sold to those nine people, how how are you gonna build your business?
07:58How how are we gonna scale this thing? That is the promise of AI. Now, often that promise falls well short, but it's not going to stop people from trying that one first.
08:07And so when somebody's really excited to do something, and they're doing their research, they're like, okay, need to figure out this new skill so I can do this thing, they're always gonna start with the path of least resistance.
08:17They're going to start with the path that's going to be the easiest, and they're going go down it a good long ways. If your path isn't the first thing they try, there's a really good chance that they never circle back around to your business and your course and the amazing work that you do.
08:35I know it's frustrating, and I talk to a lot of people who sell courses, and they're like, but that's not right. That's not how it should be because my course is so much more complete than anything that you're gonna get from AI. And they're right, and I understand their frustration, but it doesn't change the reality.
08:52AI doesn't have to be better. People just have to believe that it's at least as good, and they're gonna do it first because it's already there, it's pretty much free, and it has the promise, none of it's going to teach you how to do it, but it's just gonna do the thing for you. I think you've got to ask a question if you are in the course business.
09:11Could somebody reasonably believe that AI would just do the thing that you're teaching them to do?
09:19And if the answer is yes, your course business is in trouble. It likely already is in trouble, and that was the reality that we had to accept at Digital Marketer.
09:28One of the promises of AI is you don't have to know how to write copy. You don't have to know how to write an ad. You don't have to know how to create a campaign or to put together an SEO strategy.
09:37AI is just gonna do all that for you. Well, yeah, it does. It creates really crappy copy and, you know, boilerplate ad cam pains and all these things that kind of suck, but it's not gonna stop the person from saying, oh, if I got ChatGPT or I got Claude, I can just do this.
09:51I don't need to buy that course.
09:53Yeah. It doesn't mean the skill's less valuable. I've talked to so many people who have education businesses about how to be a copywriter or how to write SEO blog posts, and they're a zero now.
10:04Doesn't mean you shouldn't learn copy, but this is how the market reacts. So I think we've set the stage, and I think anybody who who has a a 7 or 8 figure info product business has already seen this.
10:16When I talk to people about these market headwinds, the only people I get pushback from, the people who don't see it, are either selling how to use AI or stuff around that.
10:26Yeah. Exactly. You're teaching people how to use AI, then you can still sell courses, which is kind of funny because the reality is AI is pretty good at teaching you to use AI.
10:34But, yeah, if you are doing AI stuff, you can get away with it. I know people who have one of the businesses that we're in, one of our portfolio companies, is actually a guitar lesson, chord.
10:49And, you know, it's still doing fine because AI is not going to play the guitar for you.
10:56At least you don't want it to. So if what you're teaching people to do still needs to be done in the real world, if it still needs to be done with , then I think you still probably have a decent shot.
11:13The challenge is over time, do you think more people are going to say, let me just see if I can get the answer from ChatGPT, or let me see if I can get the answer from YouTube, or do you think more people over time are going to stop using those and go back to saying, oh, let me just buy a course on this?
11:33I think the trend is definitely gonna be towards more people saying, you know, hey, Chad JBT, teach me how to play the guitar. And it's gonna do it, and you can argue that it's not gonna do it as well as you, but that's where people are going to go, there and YouTube.
11:47And I mean, just to give you some numbers around this, you know, a digital marketer, we saw in twelve to eighteen months, our sales for courses and certifications dropped to 20% of what they were over the previous period.
12:02They didn't drop by 20%, they dropped to 20%. That's a massive fall off, like nothing I've ever seen, and that's when we knew, okay, we just we have to do something different.
12:16I don't necessarily wanna ride this thing all the way to the ground. Yeah. And for those who don't know digital marketer, it's not some rinky dink business that's been around since 2014.
12:24It's you in that company have kind of educated an entire generation of marketers, including myself. Like, when I got started in my adult career, I was going to digitalmarketer.com and taking certifications and using those.
12:36So it's not some little player. And then the the other pushback I get on this from people who are like, oh, this is YouTube, AI. It's not really affecting you.
12:43It's just like they just have really small businesses, and they're not big enough to see the impacts yet. If you're doing you know, if your course did 50 k in sales, like, you're not quite at that level where a a macro impact like this would matter to you, but if you wanna build a scalable business, it it definitely does impact you.
12:58Yeah, that's exactly right, and where you're always going to have
13:01an edge is if you've built some kind of a brand, company brand or personal brand, there's always gonna be a contingent that are going to want to go straight to the source that is you. And so there there are opportunities there still.
13:15I think the question we have to ask in this new age is, is the traditional course format the best way for us to monetize our wisdom?
13:25Because we're finding increasingly that no, it's not. I wanna talk about the the best ways to monetize that that knowledge or that expertise in a second. And one question I've always wondered, kind of unrelated to this, is how do you refer to this market?
13:39Because I've always struggled with this because I talk to a lot of people who sell these types of products, courses, information products.
13:45Like, I've heard people use the term, like, info and coaching or info products or education businesses. Have you is you've been in this space. You know a lot of people.
13:55Have you ever found, like, the right term for this? Because the info products has a little bit of a negative connotation, but
14:01I don't know quite what to say. I've always thought this was silly because, yes, people used to call it info info businesses, info products, course businesses, and I do think the category that you pick for your business is really, really, really important.
14:15I looked at it and I said, this is just publishing. That's all that it is. Right?
14:22Book publishing is not a new concept, and when publishers decided that they were going to publish books on tape, for example, that was still just publishing.
14:34When universities publish research papers, it's publishing.
14:41So to me, this is all just the publishing industry. That's what we're doing, and so what segment of the publishing industry are you landing And within kind of, you've got media and you have publishing, so are we more on the media side, where we're not so much selling our IP, but we're gathering an audience?
14:59So those two business models frequently do go together. Events frequently come along to the media publishing events.
15:06I mean, all of these around one another, but I always thought that info publishing was a stupid name for the category, and yeah, did wind up sounding super scammy.
15:15I thought the course business was just astute.
15:20It's like, come on. It's the publishing
15:22business. That's what it is. Yeah.
15:25I think we'd all be better off if we all went over your definition and actually started saying it. It's
15:29hard to get that to catch on, but We would also, by the way, come up with better business models. So one of the reasons that I was able to be successful, more successful, and build a more scalable company at Digital Marketer is because I didn't define it as a quote unquote course business. It's like, okay, we're a publishing company.
15:43How do publishing companies work? Well, if you're the publisher, that doesn't mean that you're also necessarily the author. So there's publishers, there's authors, there's this whole infrastructure, so I could actually look at companies that had been around for decades that were doing ten, twenty x what I was doing and say, well, how are they structured?
15:59What's their business model? Who are they selling to? What, you know, what do their teams look like?
16:04And I could learn so much from that. Whereas if you define yourself by these narrow little categories, you're just looking at people who are the same size as you, and it's the same group think, and nobody's getting any better at any of this stuff.
16:15Good point. To go back to how to monetize knowledge and expertise now, you know, this is a big topic and a good question.
16:25What do you think is the new meta? So are we talking about for an individual personal brand, or are we trying to create a larger corporate brand?
16:34I think what what I wanna do and what a lot of listeners wanna do is they wanna build a publishing business that can scale to 8 figures. You know, they're maybe stuck at six or 7 figures right now, and they want to build something durable beyond that.
16:50Okay. So everything's gonna have to start with
16:54building some type of a media presence, because paid traffic mean, when I first got started, my very first business that I ever started online, I was selling an ebook on how to make your own baby food.
17:05I had one product, one one page website, and I could buy ads, and I could optimize for the search engines to rank and get free traffic.
17:16And that was all I needed. I'm gonna buy ads, traffic's gonna come to this page, people are gonna buy. I didn't need media.
17:22I didn't need an email list. I didn't need an audience. There certainly was no social media back in 1999 or anything like that.
17:30Media was readily available and inexpensive. Today the exact opposite is true. Today, if you want to build some type of an education publishing media type, you've got to start with, okay, how am I going to create my own media?
17:48How am I going to own my own media brand? At its core, that's obviously building an email list, something that you're very, very familiar with, but where we have to start now is pulling people off of the channels where everybody is right now, and where everybody is right now is they're on Instagram, they're on TikTok, they're on YouTube.
18:04So it starts with obviously just publishing free content, like good stuff out there that people see it and they go, okay, this person seems to have something unique and valuable to say, and I cannot stress enough how important the uniqueness of it is. And it doesn't have to be that you're necessarily saying something that nobody's ever said before, but you do need to have some type of unique insight, some type of unique perspective, a unique point of view.
18:30Usually this, by the way, is driven by unique experiences. You've actually done something that the average bear has not done.
18:39If we can get there and we can start talking about this stuff, and we can now bring them into an email list and newsletter where people are excited to hear directly from us. So it's not that in somebody's feed we happen to show up, and they were like, well, was interesting, like.
18:54But it's like, no, no, no. It's the next level. It's the difference between being seen and being followed.
19:01Right? It's I want to specifically hear from this person and what they have to say. This is the first and most difficult challenge to solve for, but that is where it all begins.
19:11Right now, it's an ecosystem where you kind of need to be in different places, driving into one, and we can kind of get into the tactics of how I've seen that be most effective. Once you've done that, now congratulations, you've built your own media.
19:26You have owned media. Once you have owned media, and you are a media company, you get to choose how you monetize.
19:35And the nice thing is is media companies have been remarkably consistent in their monetization. They monetize through advertising and sponsorships, which is not my favorite, but it can be effective depending on where you're in.
19:45They monetize through premium content access, of which courses fall in that category, but it could also be a premium community. They monetize through events, so let's get everybody together.
19:57Right? Adweek magazine does their Adweek events, and you got all these different companies that do their big events, lots of different event models.
20:06And then lastly is licensing, and this is where your core IP that you have, you license it, you let other people utilize it in different ways. But those are the four primary means through which media companies would monetize, and you're probably gonna start with just you, and then eventually if you really do wanna expand it to 8 figures, the goal should be to expand your media empire from just being a single person media empire to having multiple people where you are one of the faces on your media team, but then there are others as well.
20:41And if you just look at any media organization, that's that's the playbook that they have all run. So I know that's a lot.
20:50We can kinda double click on any of that stuff. Let's do that. So I I think we know the four categories,
20:58and most people listen to this, they've they've done well with premium content, and they're probably not we'll talk about events later.
21:06They might explore in events. They're probably not a good fit for licensing yet. And then just like you, they're not super interested in advertising.
21:13They definitely wanna build an advertising dependent business. But like we talked about, premium content, like, it's been maybe the best model for a lot of media businesses in the past five to ten years, but these headwinds have impacted a lot.
21:28And there's a lot of people who I'm kinda speaking to someone who has they've done 6 or 7 figures of some type of premium content offer membership course, but they're struggling on where where to go next because it doesn't feel like it's working anymore. So we could take this a lot of different ways.
21:42One way we could is how have you taken your content offers and adapted them to the new market, and recommendations for what other people should do too?
21:54Yeah. So two big opportunities right now that I think, especially if you've been dramatically impacted by AI, so nobody wants to buy your course anymore because they think AI can do it, there's two plays that you can run.
22:06The first play is actually kind of a modified licensing play. So what you do is you take your amazing content that you have, and you essentially stuff it into AI.
22:21You wrap AI around it, and instead of selling content, you sell access to your kind of pre trained AI, and that can take a lot of different forms, whether you're directly selling GPTs, or you're directly selling skills, if it's Claude, or you're maybe selling prompt packs and things like that.
22:42This is what we've done at Digital Marketer. So at Digital Marketer, we've stopped saying, buy this course.
22:48We've started saying, get access to this community, premium content, that has all a library of AI assistants, I. E.
22:57GPTs and skills, a library of prompts, and all the different tools that we use to train our own internal AI tools.
23:07And so now what people are doing when they log in is instead of getting a bunch of courses, they're getting AI that's essentially already been trained on our courses. So you could buy, for example, a course on how to do email marketing, or you could just buy an email marketing skill from us, or prompt pack from us, or a set of GPTs from us that will just do all the things that you would need to do as an email marketer.
23:28Now, those were enabled by the courses, and so arguably this is licensing, because what we're doing is we're taking our IP, we're packaging it up in another way, we're giving people access to it.
23:39So that's kind of the first play. The second play is you can pivot into services.
23:45So services historically are not a monetization mechanism in and around media companies.
23:53They can be in some cases, but in general a service company is more likely to be an advertiser to a media company than a media company is to say, let's spin off a services division. But you do have it, and we're seeing now this is becoming far more viable for people who maybe they don't want to have a service, you know, they don't want have a service component to the business because they don't want to, you know, have a large team and have to deal with a bunch of clients.
24:19If what you can do, and again, we haven't done this at Digital Marketer, but we could. So at Digital Marketer, we could say, if you just want us to build out your marketing campaigns for you, we will do that.
24:30Just give us money and we'll do it. And the way that we would do that is we would leverage the AI tools that we built, which have been trained on our courses, and we would just deliver the finished end result.
24:41This is what we're doing at my other company, at the Scalable company. Started out as a course business. Nobody wanted to buy the course.
24:47We said, all right, screw it. We'll just do it with you. We'll just do it for you.
24:51And we work one on one with clients to build out their operating systems for their businesses instead of having them go through a course to do it, but that process, which is a twelve to sixteen week process, is heavily enabled by AI.
25:06So it's our people working with clients, but they're gonna do an interview with a client.
25:13All that interview stuff is gonna be fed into AI that, again, has been trained on our proprietary IP, what in the past would have been called a course. And now it's just doing the thing for him, just delivering it for him.
25:24So I think those are the two
25:26vehicles that you have today, the paths that we're taking. That's great. That's a really concise breakdown.
25:31I haven't heard you break it all down that way. I think that'll be super useful. Do you think so the way I like to learn is by kind of case studies, looking at examples.
25:39And so, like, I've I've, you know, go buy I've bought what Digital Marketer sells, and I've learned a lot from that. You can you can go look at getscalablescalable.co, right, to learn more about what you do there.
25:51Are there any other people you think have have made this pivot well? You know, like, someone comes to mind like a Cole Gordon who's done, you know, services and productized services really well, but also has a great media presence.
26:04Who else do you look at for inspiration?
26:06I'm honestly not seeing a lot of course first businesses doing this very well right now, which is why I think it creates phenomenal opportunity. And I'll tell you, man, I've been looking, cause I'm looking for inspiration myself.
26:18What I'm seeing some course businesses doing is they're starting to leverage AI tools in things like lead magnets.
26:27So here's a little simple, you know, GPT or prompt pack that will You can have it for free in exchange for a name, email address, in exchange for opting in to my newsletter.
26:38So they're using them on the front end as like middle of funnel content, gated content. They're incorporating AI into what they're doing in terms of I'll teach you how to use it, but they're so stuck in the I'm a course business game that they just won't break that.
26:59That was the big thing that we were willing to do at Digital Marketer, and we were willing to do it, man, for an 8 figure business. We were willing to take an 8 figure business down to the studs and say every single product we've ever sold, we are no longer selling anymore.
27:12The only thing we're selling right now is access to our AI tools that have been trained on our stuff, and I just don't know a lot I haven't seen a lot of other people who are willing to make that move, and I've checked. No.
27:24There's not. I think, you know, Hermosy, it's not that he had a chorus business before, but he had, you know,
27:29what was it? Jim Launch was more education and and coaching, and I like what he's doing with his workshop in advising business.
27:36I don't have to get into that, but I think it's a unique model I'm seeing more people copy, of course, because everybody copies Hermosy and especially someone like him. But it is a cool, you know, model that's maybe less impacted by AI.
27:49It's so in person. It's it's different.
27:51And and I think that's that's another thing that you could do. You could flip it completely. Again, this is something that has already existed, but I am seeing course businesses shifting away from selling access to content, and instead pivoting much harder into community, especially in person, and they're having some success with that.
28:08There's scalability challenges there, and certainly logistic challenges, but that can also be a phenomenal model.
28:17And I'm not saying, by the way, that courses won't kind of come back around to a certain extent. I think right now it's really depressed because people believe that AI will just do it. Some of that will turn out not to be true.
28:29I just don't think it's ever gonna come back to where it was. So if you were running a sizable business back in 2022, and you're like, I just want to get back to there, I don't think it's gonna happen from selling courses alone.
28:40I think you're gonna need to figure something out. And even if you look at Alex, Alex now has a I forget, think it's like a thousand dollars a month or something like that, but they've got what is essentially a group coaching type deal.
28:53There's no in person, there's no services.
28:55Yeah, ACQ Advantage if people want to research it more, like keep going. Yeah. One of the main reasons that people
29:01buy that is because you get access to his AI CFO tool, Right? So even there, AI is critical component, and these internal AI tools are a critical component of this.
29:14And I think we're gonna see this more and more, people just wanting the different AI tools built for them because everybody wants AI, they want to use AI, but most people aren't getting as much as they know they could out of AI.
29:27AI just out of the box is an idiot. It's pretty smart, but it's not that smart. So if you've got great IP, if you've got great content, stop trying to sell the content.
29:38Train AI, sell access to the AI that's been trained on your content.
29:42It's a lot more sellable. It's gonna get a lot better results for your people. That's a good point.
29:46It seems like his Alex's marketing angle there is mostly around the primary benefit is getting the ACQ AI trained on all of his content, exactly what you talked about before and what you've done. And then the secondary benefit is, like, community, some q and a with their team, stuff like that.
30:00It's all it's all in a membership product, and they built almost like a small language model all around Alex's stuff, and I heard heard good things about it. I wanna shift to the, like, maybe the other path, which you mentioned, which is kinda like events, live experiences, and one second. I wanna get your take on, like, other things people have tried to kind of pivot away from courses.
30:16I've seen a lot of people, like, they had a, you know, one of these nine nine seven courses, and then they kind of built a coaching program on top of that, and they're charging five, ten times that price. That's been a very common trend.
30:30Do you think that can be a sustainable model if people pivot?
30:34I mean, to me, that's a services business, right? And again, it's the terms that we use. So we use the term coaching, and coaching is a category, like, that is a thing, but to me, coaching is a subset of consulting, which is services.
30:46And so I would just say, okay, so they're doing a services business now. Now, it's a spectrum. There are some services that are hyper bespoke and one on one, and then there are some services that are a bit more productized.
30:57And so I do love productized services. That's effectively what we're doing at the scalable company, so when somebody comes in as a client for us, that first twelve to sixteen weeks is incredibly productized.
31:11Somebody comes through, and they're going to go through a process that will be identical no matter who you are. It is customized for each one of them, but the process itself that they're going through is, and what the output is, is the same for everybody, which means that we can actually begin to scale it.
31:32And then if they stick with us, now we get into more just kind of bespoke services and consulting type things, but at least for that first twelve to sixteen weeks, heavily productized, which allows us to get our clients a quick win, and it just gives us a lot more economies of scale on the front end.
31:50I would just see that as kind of a subset of the services arm. It can be effective.
31:55I think what a lot of people try to do is they try to just sell access to the course with some calls, like group calls and stuff like that to go along with it and charge 10x. I think that's gonna be a really, really, really difficult sell once you've sold to all your true believers.
32:11New people coming in who don't yet know, like, and trust you are gonna be less likely to spend 10 for something if what you're selling is access to a bunch of stuff.
32:23Ultimately, the closer that we can get to selling the promised end result and delivering that, the better we're going to be. Very true. I've seen that too.
32:30Another pivot people have made is cohorts,
32:33and I wonder, live cohort based courses or boot camps, I wonder if you think that can be a scalable 8 figure business.
32:40There's not a lot of examples out there. Yeah, know. I mean, and there were a lot of those that were doing really well two or three years ago, right?
32:45And they're not doing as well today. So I think that it's something that you definitely can do. I think it's a good model.
32:52I don't believe it's a business model unto itself, because really, you think about it, a cohort based course sort of sits in between a pure course business and a coaching business. And so it has all of the sales constraints of coaching, because at the end of the day, when you're selling coaching, you're saying, I'm going to help you do this thing, but you're going to do it, and I'm going to be there while you do it.
33:16Now, that's better than I'm going to give you access to the thing you figured out for yourself, but it's still not really what people want. They just want the thing. They just want the end result, most people.
33:26So with the cohort based thing, have the same issue, you're just now bringing in friction of, well, I can't make those dates, and I'm busy at that time, And so what it does is it creates these spikes in the business that can be just very difficult from a cash flow perspective.
33:41I know lots of people who've had really good sized cohort based businesses who they basically love life a couple of months out of the year and hate it the rest of the year because they're either starving to death or they're working themselves to death. But it I think it's a nice addition. I don't I don't believe it's a business model unto itself.
33:59Cool. Okay. I wanna get your thoughts on all that, and we got two different paths.
34:02Maybe a third path you've done successfully is events and conference businesses and things like that, so I'll try and move a little bit faster and kinda get to your your frameworks around events. So for those who don't know, you've built, scaled, and sold some really big events or or really maybe one really big event business and and multiple other big events.
34:23Can you kind of tell me what that is and, like, tell us the scale that that was at so people can be aware of it? Yeah. Sure.
34:30So Traffic and Conversion Summit was an event that we launched back in 2008,
34:35really before digital marketer was even a thing, and it started out as just a very small kinda let's see if we can get some people on the email list to show up for this event, probably kinda how your event started, right, a couple years ago.
34:47Team Traffic Conversion Summit was the same way, and it just it grew year after year. People loved showing up.
34:54The content was good. We didn't it wasn't a pitchfest, which a lot of the other events were back in the day, which is sort of its own which is its own model, and we ran that event. We sold that event after year nine.
35:07You know, COVID and just, I would argue, some mismanagement by the acquirers. Part of the is no longer around anymore, but that was an 8 figure business just by itself.
35:16And, yeah, we were able to sell that event for, I mean, truly a life changing amount of money for for me and my and my partners. So they can get big. Events are highly,
35:26highly scalable if you pick the right model for them. Yeah. I'll talk about the model in a second, but TNC was was it 15 or 20,000
35:33attendees at the peak? I forget the It was actually it was right at 10,000 at the peak.
35:39Paid, ticketed attendees. Now, in and around the ecosystem of the event was at least 12 to 15,000 people, because there were events popping up around it kind of just sucking off of it, which is what, at scale, it's what you want to have happen.
35:55Now, you'd like to own those events too, but that was kind of the ecosystem that was there.
36:01You were telling me a long time ago about there's kind of two different event models, and so if someone's kinda considering launching an event, tell us about those two models.
36:12And if there's more than two, let me know too, but I think that's a great starting point for this. There's basically three, I would say, kind of big models. The first model of an event is the expo
36:21event. And so the expo event is it's basically a trade show.
36:26Right? I mean, if you think about a Comic Con or a gun show, you know, or any of the baseball cards, any of these events, or really large trade shows, those are expos.
36:38People are coming because there's a trade floor, and people are coming because other people are there. There's some type of two sided marketplace. You've got buyers, and you've got sellers, and they want to meet each other.
36:48And this is kind of a very classic It works in B2B and B2C, but the expo, if you've got that kind of two sided marketplace, think, these can be incredibly profitable.
37:00They're hard to build, they're expensive, they take time to get going, but if you can pull it off, really valuable. The other type of event is the convention.
37:08So the convention event, this is the event where people are coming mostly for the content, and they're coming for the networking.
37:15So there might be a little trade show there, but mostly people are coming because other people are there, and this is where all the best ideas get get shared. That's what digital marketer I'm sorry, that's what Traffic and Conversion Summit started as.
37:27Eventually, these models can get blended into what's known as a convex, so a convention expo, where you've got a really good sized convention component, and then there's also a large expo floor. That can definitely be a model, but it's usually gonna be more convention y than more expo y, or more expo y, more convention y.
37:42The third type is the community event, or the sales event, for lack of a better term, and this is where it's a single track, typically one stage, and you're getting your community, your audience to come in to with the goal of monetizing not necessarily through ticket sales or through sponsorships, but through sales at the event of your products and your services.
38:11That's the main thing. So you talked about Alex Ramosy and his workshops that he's doing. That's actually that kind of event in smaller scale.
38:19What we're doing now at Scalable is that type of event in, you know, larger scale.
38:26Trafficking and Conversion Summit started out as that, and it shifted into a convention which is gonna monetize through ticket sales and sponsorship, same with
38:34an expo style event. So the model that you pick is important, and you really wanna be thoughtful about that. Yeah.
38:40And I wanna just maybe break down convention events a little bit more, because that's what I'm building, so I'm gonna be selfish, and a lot of people listen to this have that too. If someone wants to you know, see a good community event, they should go to GetScalableLive or go to her Mosie workshop and just that's the best way to learn how to do one or any event really is just to go there.
38:56I mean, what what's the business model of convention events? Like, is the real money made through ticket sales or the sponsors or exhibitors?
39:04Yeah. A healthy convention event is half and half. So you've got about 50% of your revenue coming in through ticket sales, and about 50% of your revenue coming in through sponsors, which may or may not They might have a booth if you've got a little expo floor, or they might just have their name on a building, or they might be getting a speaking slot, which I don't always love, but that can be another way to do that.
39:29And if it's fiftyfifty, it's really, really healthy because it means that people are willing to pay to come to this event, they value the content, but also the types of people you're getting are high enough value that other people want to pay to have access to these people. So that's the that's the best model for that.
39:44Whereas like an expo event, it might be eightytwenty sponsors and exhibitors to ticket holders.
39:50There's lots of expo events where they basically give away the tickets.
39:53Very true. Tell me about, this is a big question, just like all my sponsorships and exhibitors.
40:00But, like, for me, getting someone to buy a ticket and delivering a good experience is not easy, but it's straightforward. Working with exhibitors, there's feels like there's more moving pieces.
40:10And also, there's a difference between a sponsor and an exhibitor from what I understand. So is if you're talking to someone like me who's got a year, like, one to three event, who's trying to figure out how sponsorships work, how to sell, and how to fulfill on them, what would you recommend?
40:29You are going to if you're looking at doing a convention style event, and you want to create the place, because that really is your goal. If you're creating an event a convention style event, you want this to be the place, Not just for your people, but for an industry, for a cohort, like people need to say, because I'm a this, I go there.
40:51That's the key to a convention. Because I'm a this, because I'm one of these types of people, I go there because my people are there. Now, that doesn't just happen overnight because you decided it could happen.
41:02You could do a community event overnight because you got your audience, hey, I'm gonna be here, and you wanna be here because I'm here. A good convention event, people come because other people are there, not because of the person hosting the event, and that's the shift that needs to take place, but they usually start looking at community events, and that shift, that pivot, takes three or four years.
41:23The reason that's important is because until it starts to become the place, sponsors and exhibitors don't want to be there either.
41:31So you're kind of in this chicken and egg scenario where you've got to get enough critical mass built up to where it makes sense for a sponsor and an exhibitor to be there, and it's not until you're getting to around about 3,000 attendees that it really makes sense to charge, you know, ten, fifteen, 20,000 and up to sponsor that event, and really where you want to get is you want to get to where you have 50 and $100,000 sponsorship levels.
42:04By the end at TNC, think we had a $250,000 sponsorship level.
42:11That's gonna be really difficult to justify if your event is 400 people, 500 people, unless it just happens to be some of the wealthiest people in the world, and the average order value is crazy high. But, you know, drawn from a speaking in generalities, you need about 3,000 people.
42:27These become the place. This is gonna take a good number of years. You need to have multiple stages so that there's room for people to go.
42:35So we're talking about more room for people to sit, so that's increased complexity, and you also need to create flow where people are walking around so they're not just all stuck in the same room all day because exhibitors don't necessarily like that. So that's why right now, I mean, you just had your third year, right?
42:52Second year. Oh my God, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're right just in the suck of it, right?
42:58Year two is the worst, because year one, it's fun and everything's new and people are coming out.
43:06Year two, it's when you're trying to grow and you're trying to get bigger, but it just hasn't gotten that much bigger yet.
43:14It doesn't become a habit until about year three, and it's in year four where you find out, okay, are people coming because it's there? They're not coming because we asked them to come, they're not coming because we advertised it well, they're not coming because of the amazing speakers, they're coming because it's there.
43:31And when that happens, it really is that if you build it, they will come. If you will build the convention, you will now have sponsors just asking to be there.
43:40And I was thinking at TNC, we were able to tell everybody, we got one premium booth and one premium sponsorship. Somebody's gonna buy it. Do you want it to be you?
43:47Yeah. You don't really need to have a sophisticated
43:49sales process or or a 30 page deck to to do that when you when you build that type of you know, cornerstone event.
43:57Well, you're still gonna have to have a sales process and a sales team to, like, sell these things. But I guess what what I'm saying is, like, I may be obsessing about some of the tactics when I need to look at the big picture like you'd like, you just broke down and focus on that first, and then I'll I'll still get those details as we go.
44:12Our goal for Traffic and Aversion Summit,
44:15you know, years one, two, and three was we didn't care how much money we made. We just wanted everybody to leave and say, holy crap, that was the best event I've ever been to in my entire life, because we knew if they thought that, that they would come back, and they'd probably tell somebody else that they needed to be there too, and that's exactly what happened.
44:31So we just focused, and this is cliche, right? How do you a large audience? How do you succeed on YouTube?
44:35There's all these tactics and stuff like that, ultimately it comes down to like, do you have good stuff? Do you have good content? Do people like watching you?
44:42If you do, you win, and if you don't, you could have the best hook and follow all the perfect thumbnail formatting and all this other stuff, but if your content sucks, it's not gonna get traction. And so you just need to put on an amazing event, and you're probably going to lose money the first two or three years.
45:01We did. I think we maybe broke even year three, and it really didn't start to take off until about year five or six.
45:07That was when it got incredibly profitable.
45:10Yeah, and it's almost like you should be breaking even, because there's a correlation between how much you spend and how great the event is. So if a year one or two event is super profitable, the attendee experience probably wasn't as good as it could have been. I think that's a great point.
45:24You should be putting it back in there,
45:26but saying, okay, we're spending this money. Are the attendees going to value it?
45:32And so maybe you don't need to spend as much on the AV budget in the beginning, but maybe you want to spend a little bit more on having some incredible speakers that people are gonna be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they're here, you know, and we got access to them, if that's something that your audience cares about.
45:48Maybe what your audience cares about are the parties, as funny as that sounds. And so you say, we're gonna spend more money on just an amazing, phenomenal party the evening after day two of a three day event, because we want everybody talking about this party and how they wanted to be at this party.
46:04So understanding what your audience values and where you should be allocating those resources so that it becomes the thing that they talk about and the reason they want to come back, that's the secret.
46:15That's the magic. And for Trafficking and Conversion Summit, we invested heavily in speakers and celebrities when everybody was like, that's stupid.
46:24You shouldn't do that. None of our peers were doing that at all, but it was such an elevation of the event. Now, if I were doing that event today, probably wouldn't do that.
46:32We would probably take a different path, because just speakers and celebrities we found aren't the elevation that they once were, but that was where we chose to put our budget, and we overspent there dramatically, and underspent in a lot of other places.
46:46So that was the idea.
46:49Yep. That's really helpful. Maybe if I can get two or three more tactical event questions in because we we're gonna wrap up soon.
46:56Sponsorship tiers, is there anything that worked well for you? Like, you see the kinda, like, the one, two, and three or the platinum silver gold or that work well.
47:04And I guess what I'm what we're struggling with is every sponsor wants to speak, and every sponsor wants more and more stuff. They want you to send an email or this or that.
47:14Right? And then the best sponsors for not the best, but great sponsors are people who are just they'll pay just to exhibit and just be there and just have booth space.
47:24Right? It's it's a easy sell. It's easy to fulfill as a event organizer.
47:29And so we're trying to to to figure that out. Like, what are our tiers? What do we offer the higher tiers?
47:35How do we make that worth it without putting everybody on stage? Because we're not gonna do that.
47:39You know? Again, big question, but anything that's worked for you would be interesting.
47:44Yeah. So you want to be crystal clear on what's
47:47the highest tier of all, and what does that work to you, and you're gonna sell that to one.
47:54There's gonna be one that is they are the presenting sponsor, and so it's gonna be their name on all the stuff, and you're gonna say, okay, what does this sponsor get?
48:05And the reason you want to do that one first is because that's essentially gonna create the category of all of the things that somebody could maybe get. So they're gonna get So for us, it was Traffic and Conversion Summit presented by whoever our presenting sponsor was, and we actually always had two because one of the presenting sponsors was always digital marketer.
48:27Made sure that our own company was a presenting sponsor at our event, we made it clear to the other presenting sponsor, yeah, it's shared, but the other one is us, so you're in good company, and they were always fine with that.
48:39That's what's gonna create the list of deliverables that they're going to get, and that sponsor's getting all of them.
48:47So you've got to decide what are the things that you're willing to do. We were willing to give a speaking slot to the presenting sponsor, but we got to approve the topic, and we got to approve the speaker.
48:58And what we always sought to do, because putting people on stage, to me that is the riskiest and the most valuable thing that you will give away, So you want to be very, very, very careful with that, because if they go up there and they do a crappy session that's just a pitchfest, now all a sudden the talk of the event is, uh, all these the whole thing's just a pitchfest, everybody's just paying to be there, sessions aren't any good, and they stop coming back, and that's where it rots from the inside.
49:25So we were hyper protective of the stage, because that's what people valued. Now, if people are coming to your convention and they don't really care that much about the sessions, they more care about the networking events, it doesn't matter as much.
49:37So I want to make sure I'm not coming off as dogmatic, it just depends on the model, but for us at Traffic and Conversion Summit, people were coming for the content that was put up on there on the stage, so that was the thing that we were the slowest to give away.
49:49But you want to look at every single thing that is out there. So you have a stage, you have a room, does somebody get to put their name on that room?
49:58They get to spot Is it So we would have, you the You might have the beehive stage. They get to own that stage and get it branded around that stage. You're gonna have coffee.
50:07Who's sponsoring the coffee? Is there a brand on the cups themselves, or is it just a sign around it? You're saying, hey, thank you.
50:13You might have some, you know, obviously you should have some booth spaces somewhere. How big is it? So all of these things factor into it, and we would always have one kind of presenting sponsor.
50:24We'd have the level below that where we would have two or three, and they would usually get a stage named after them as well. They'd get the largest possible booth, and they'd get a bunch of other things thrown in.
50:34And then below that, now you're talking about, you know, the gold and silver, and that had almost everything to do with booth size and location. So the better locations got the bigger areas, those sold for the most.
50:49The ability to send email communication to attendees before and or after was another thing that we would, you know, at times throw in. So just coming up with a list, and AI is really great at this, by the way.
51:02I wish we'd had that. Hey, I'm doing this event. What are all the things I could possibly give away, you know, included in a sponsorship deal?
51:07It'll be hugely helpful. Yeah. I mean, And just creating the package and prompting it and saying, ask me details about the event so that you can help me brainstorm additional ideas, I would definitely do that.
51:20For us, though, going back to stage time, we made sure that we approved the topic, we made sure that we approved the speaker, and what we said is, we're not gonna let you just go up there and do a pitchfest. It has to be content, and then at the end, we will come up, and we will sell your thing for you.
51:37And you want us to do that, because then you get to maintain total authority during the event, because all you did was give content.
51:45When we come up, we'll say, you should definitely go up there, you should use them out here, here's a special thing that we got them to do for you, and it's just way more effective and way cooler for all involved, and that's how we got around that.
51:58Even if they wanted to do content, sometimes we'd say, well, do you need to do the content, or would you like to have somebody on our team do the content about how we're using your tool? Wouldn't that be even more effective?
52:09We would build content presentations for them because it was just better for all involved.
52:15Yeah. Those are those are all fascinating things. Definitely gonna listen to this later.
52:19But, like, I've always wondered, like, what's the perfect event format? And I've obsessed over, you know, should we or should our sessions be forty five minutes with fifteen minute breaks, or should they be thirty minutes?
52:28Or just I don't wanna get too nerdy, but maybe as the last thing, have you have you found for someone who's building these types of events, convention events, what type of programming schedule has worked well for you, or just what what do you like personally?
52:41Yeah, I mean, and this matters. This is a phenomenal question, because this really, really, really matters.
52:46Break time at events is critical, because if you don't have long breaks at events, your exhibitors will get pissed, and we made this mistake at TNC.
52:56So we would have forty five minute sessions with thirty minute breaks, and our session times were all the same. We made the mistake one year, and then we repeated the mistake a few years later, because I guess sometimes we gotta learn We do the same crap over and over again and have to relearn it, but where we would say, okay, we're gonna have forty five minute sessions, and then we'll have thirty minute sessions that'll be a little bit tighter and more concise, man, it was so hard to manage just logistically, especially when you get on to different stages.
53:28So when you have multiple stages, you really need everything starting and stopping at the same time, and when you got into those tighter sessions, it's just really, really, really hard.
53:40So the only exception that I would make is we might do a double session, so if there was gonna be two people back to back and they were gonna be two twenty minute sessions, then we would kind of clump them together. But when you have multiple stages, the problem is is people will get up in the middle of this one to go over here, and it just creates this weird visual of everybody leaving when a new speaker's coming up.
54:01So I'm a big fan of there's a session, there's a break. There's a session, there's a break. There's a session, there's a break, and on and on and on just like that.
54:11You can typically get three in in the morning, three or four in in the afternoon depending on how late you wanna go. Call it six sessions.
54:19We would run and do sessions over lunch, the way that we would stagger lunch. At scale, you need to do that so you don't overwhelm the facilities at the location anyway, and people are sort of picking and choosing what they want to do.
54:32But aside from we might have the opening keynote, that might be a longer hour long session, and I do like the idea if you have multiple stages, you can have the first session be everybody in the main room if you have room, and then after that you go into breakouts, and then the last session bring everybody back into the same room.
54:51Yeah. If you can make it you can make it work. Yeah.
54:54I really like that format when I was at TNC,
54:57and beginning and ending there. You have to do long breaks for two reasons. You want people to network with each other and the sponsors, you want them to reset themselves.
55:07Bathroom lines at scale get really long, so we've just found that thirty minutes is about what you need, and again, people are not just there for the content, they're there for the networking.
55:18So we value that time and create spaces for networking within your event.
55:23Yeah. What I didn't realize is if you just give a fifteen minute break, they keep there's not enough time to network.
55:28It's basically bathroom or check your phone and come back. It goes by super quick, so so you need that longer. I saw a couple cool things at TNC where it's like during those breaks or lunches, there's almost like different activations, like a meetup for agencies or any last question would be like, any cool things, like, in the actual convention space that you did outside of breaks and actual onstage sessions that people really enjoyed or that you would recommend,
55:53I do or other people do? Yeah. The first thing I would look to do, if you can pull it off and if you have the space for it, if you can have some kind of a stage out on your expo floor, that's really great because it kinda creates just some noise, and will draw people out to the expo floor.
56:10You obviously don't want it to be right next to somebody's booth, or that's a little bit obnoxious, but if you have the space for it, having an additional stage out there, that's also a place where you can run demos, and you can give sponsors access to that stage. We started doing that I think year eight or nine at TNC.
56:27That was a big win overall, because it did create an activation.
56:31It wasn't running always at the same time. Frequently, we would have it run during breaks.
56:36And so how you program that stage, it's the only stage that could be on a totally different schedule than all of the other ones, you know, by design. If you can have sponsors who will give things away, like we had a sponsor every year who gave away a car, and that was the deal.
56:52If you're going to sponsor, you're like, you're the car sponsor, and so you're gonna be giving away a car, and your price of admission to be a sponsor is gonna be reduced by the fact that we know that you're giving away a car.
57:05So maybe it's a $75,000 sponsorship that they only pay 25,000 for. Now, why do you want to do this?
57:12Well, again, if you've got the space for it, and if you've an Expo floor, can. They won't let you just do this in any hotel, but if you park a car in the middle of a floor and they wrap it with their logo and stuff like that, that's something that people will walk around and look at. So that does create kind of a separate activation.
57:29Also, you do the drawing, that's a phenomenal opportunity. Everybody's in the room, they want to find out who won the car. Not something you're probably going to do year one, and it doesn't have to be a car, but just think, what is something really, really, really cool that is a visual that we could give away, that our audience would desire?
57:46That creates an on the floor activation. Just different little events and things that are out on the floor, like having a pop a shot.
57:56We had one of those electronic bowl writing deals, but every single one of these activations is sponsored by one of the exhibitors, so it's not something that we just are paying for.
58:13It's something that a sponsor is paying to be there. Coffee, like having a coffee stand, a bar on the floor, where people You're creating now a networking space for people to gather, You could say, hey, from this time to this time, this sponsor's hosting a happy hour, where they're doing and they can have a special drink named after them.
58:30So anything that you can do to create these opportunities that just make people feel like, well, that was fun is good.
58:38In addition to that, want to think, how do we get people together? How do we connect them? And so creating meetups from this time to this time, everybody who's in this type of space, they're gonna be gathering in this spot, and having somebody on your team who's there to sort of facilitate the networking.
58:53And then another thing that we would do for our highest level sponsors is we would ask them, who is your ideal person that you absolutely want to connect with while you're here?
59:02Who's your ideal client profile, avatar, all that? And we had a team that would schedule meetings for them, for our highest level sponsors.
59:14So if they wanted to meet CMOs of companies in this industry of a particular size, we had our partnership and networking team who would review the folks who would come to the event and say, hey, the good folks over at XYZ Corp would really love to connect with you.
59:35If we can facilitate a meeting. They're looking to buy lunch and all this other stuff, and sort of create a thing that both mutually agree that they're gonna show up.
59:43So whether it's direct one on one connections, creating meetups for subgroups within your larger group, and activations in and around the event.
59:53Parties are another good if you're the top sponsor results in the sponsor for a party. All of these are things that you should look to do so that your event isn't just what happens when the emcee walks up on stage at 09:00 and when they dismiss everybody at five.
1:00:07The things that are happening between and around, that really is what makes an event.
1:00:12Yeah. That's really good advice. The the meeting thing is one thing we definitely among all that stuff is one thing that was highly requested.
1:00:20And and there are people who that's all they do, by the way.
1:00:23And they're a company you can hire temps that that that's basically all they do just, you know, just for that event. Yeah. It seems like there's some events where some are just built around that where some people attend for free, but they have to schedule meetings.
1:00:35It's a whole another can of worms we don't need to get into, but Yeah. It's important. This this has been great.
1:00:39Ryan, where can people find you if they wanna learn more about Scalable or any of your other stuff? I'm posting all of my content for free on YouTube because I'm like, nobody's buying it anyway, so let's just put it out there for free. So
1:00:50if you go to YouTube and just look for you know, search for Ryan Dice, d e I s s, you'll find find me there. I do also have a newsletter at accidentalmba.com, so if you wanna subscribe to my newsletter.
1:01:02I've been consistently publishing now for over a year, every Sunday for over a year.
1:01:08It's all me. I don't have outside writers. I use AI for the brainstorm, but I mean, it's me actually writing the thing, doing all the all it's the only thing that I do where it's just a 100% me.
1:01:20And so I'm I'm very close and personal to that to that newsletter as well. So
1:01:25Yeah. I'm a big fan of both, and we'll put a link for both and and more down below. So thank you, Ryan.
1:01:30Yeah. Thanks, man.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Ryan Deiss built DigitalMarketer into an eight-figure publishing empire that educated a generation of digital marketers — then watched it fall to pieces in eighteen months. Not a dip. Not a correction. A structural collapse to 20 percent of prior revenue, caused by three forces he now names plainly: the post-COVID bubble, YouTube, and AI. This is the post-mortem, and the playbook for what comes next.
