Hey yall, I wanted to share my experience this month creating an exclusive one month reward for a live class I’m teaching on Patreon. At $250 I was able to get 25 students to sign up for my 30-Day Instagram Challenge Course, blowing my expectations away.
I was inspired by Andy J Pizza who had a live 3 month class on Patreon and wanted to experiment with it! The key for me has been a promotion on social media and creating a scarcity for the class since it’s live and only available for a limited time.
For those of you out there that are providing educational content, doing a live stream course is a must. You just create a limited tier, go live once a week using an unlisted YouTube link, and attach any samples or slides when this class is over to the original live post on Patreon. I’ve also included integration with Discord so students could connect even after class to share links, artwork, and get feedback.
So far the feedback from the community has been really great and I’m kicking myself for not doing this sooner.
The only hiccup I experienced was that Patreon was down on the 1st, making it frustrating for users to sign up. Since I have Pay up front enabled I couldn’t get people to sign up before the class started on the 1st. I lost many potential students that day because of the website blackout but was still able to fill up the class with some extra marketing and social media tip freebies proving my value.
I will be doing more classes in the future on building a website for artists to attract clients and how to even start a Patreon to create a community around your work. This is just the beggining and I’m excited to see where it takes me.
Patreon, just try not to be broken on the 1st anymore ok?
This is all so wonderful to hear, apart from the outage on the first, which is something we definitely do not want or expect to happen again either. I’ve shared this with our creator success team too so they can pass this on to other creators they work with.
Highlighting this quote for visibility, thank you for letting other creators learn from your experience!
The key for me has been a promotion on social media and creating a scarcity for the class since it’s live and only available for a limited time.
For those of you out there that are providing educational content, doing a live stream course is a must. You just create a limited tier, go live once a week using an unlisted YouTube link, and attach any samples or slides when this class is over to the original live post on Patreon. I’ve also included integration with Discord so students could connect even after class to share links, artwork, and get feedback.
WOW. This is an amazing idea! I’m in the infancy stages of putting online courses together and it never dawned on me I could funnel them through Patreon. My wheels are turning bigtime! Thanks for sharing this!
I’ve barely been on Patreon for a month so I hadn’t even realized there was a “Limited” tier. I have TONS of courses I could teach live at least once a quarter. Fabulous idea!
Just to be clear, once that month is up, the patrons are not being charged again, right? What happens to current patrons? They opt to go up and then just go back to their normal tier after?
There’s basic patrons-only way to post things as a creator. There’s also x€-patrons-only way. So you can post only to those patrons who pay more than x€. If you have per-month campaign than patrons will be charged every month until they opt-out. If you have per-thing campaign they will be charged for any post you decide (public or patrons-only). How you structure your tiers is up to you.
I’m putting my 31 Day Fingerstyle Guitar Mastery Class together for January and want to know if I could ask you some specific questions and learn from your experience?
Thanks to Dina’s inspiration, I am preparing to launch my first Special Tier, One-Month Class on patreon.
I would love to have some feedback, please
Here is the info:
My anxiety is particularly that this goes live on Jan 1st (to prevent people from being charged twice) but I will have an active Social Media campaign from now until the class launches, as well as reports and reminders after the class has started.
My Questions:
Is it possible to create the special tier ahead of time to preview it, without making it live? And without having to do it early on January 1st?
I know I can create the Lesson Posts ahead of time and have them set to release each day. Is there anything else I’m missing with the delivery side of things?
Excited, energized and still full of simmering trepidation about this…
Patreon isn’t really meant for what are you trying to do. Patreon is about permanent payments—either per month or per “thing”. But you are trying to selling a single course. This won’t work well. It’s probably too late now, but I’m afraid you didn’t pick the right platform for that. Selling online video courses for a single fee is a different concept and there are tons of other sites, which are specialized to do exactly that.
Hey @steveeulberg, Mindy’s on vacation, so stepping in to answer:
Yes, if people sign up on December 31st and you have on charge up front, they will be charged twice.
Patreon is designed for monthly billing (or per-thing billing). In order to prevent your patrons from being charged, you will have to pause your entire campaign, however, please note pausing only works for one month. I recommend reading the whole help center article. It may be better to approach this as a per-thing project, so people are only billed when you deliver, but again, you’d have to create different tiers for each project and only charge that tier, which could get convoluted.
You have to issue the refunds. Please see this help desk article explaining more about that. This article walks you through how to issue the refund.
For more specific questions, your best bet is to contact the Community Happiness team, who can answer more specific questions about billing.
This has launched and students have begun joining the tier for the Special Class. I will keep tabs and report on my learning from this venture. Happy New Year!
This course went live and has (3) Active Students, which is far less than the limit of 25 that I published, but actually makes a first offering very manageable. I’ve had email and message communication with all of them.
2 of the 3 joined for the First Weekly Video Check-in and got connected with each other, in addition to being aware that they are coming to Fingerstyle Guitar Mastery from two very different places, but still finding the class to be what they need and value.
The nuts and bolts of setting this all up by scheduling the delivery of the Course Material daily takes alot of attention to detail, but I’m realizing that part of my make-up is really fed by doing that. It is almost like a nerdy parallel to getting a musical phrase composed, played or recorded just right. I also have the organizational skills to keep track of what needs to happen when and where…IF I remember to use them! Had a couple of “oops” moments that are now fixed.
The added income for this month is very helpful, and I have several other courses (to focus on other instrumental markets) on my drawing board.
