His First Course Earned $105,637 in 4 Days

Matt McGarry has been publishing Newsletter Operator since January 2023.

It’s a newsletter about growing and monetizing a newsletter 📈

Off the back of that, Matt recently launched a cohort course called Growth System, which did quite well…

You don’t need a large audience to make money…

I had 13,230 email subscribers at the time [of launch].

The course generated $105,637 in revenue and we sold out of seats for the cohort in 4 days.

📝 Some backstory…

I’ve been running GrowLetter, an agency that helps media companies and creators grow their newsletters for 2 years.

I talk to people who want help but can’t afford our services all the time.

The goal of Growth System is to be the “do it yourself” or “done with you” service option for people who can’t work with our agency yet.

In the course, I teach all the tactics we use to get clients more engaged newsletter subscribers and convert them into customers.

Plus, I share templates, examples, and case studies to make it easy to implement these growth tactics.

🤑 Pricing…

Cohort courses usually cost $800 to $1500 with some higher-end examples ranging from $2000 to $5000.

I decided to price my first cohort on the lower end of that and charge $999.

I limited the first cohort to 100 total students.

His reasoning for that limit 👇

1) To give me enough time to share 1on1 feedback with each student (I also paid 3 coaches to help with student feedback + coaching)

2) To keep the first cohort small. It’s better to limit the first cohort to a small group. Improve it. Then share it with a larger audience later.

3) To make it easier to sell. Real scarcity and urgency make this much easier.

I especially like that last point 👍

Another key thing for Matt was running free webinars, which he promoted via his newsletter and tweets like this (~16k followers on Twitter).

💬 He writes…

I did 5 live webinars in December 2023 and January 2024…

At the end of the webinar, I added slides about the benefits of the course, the limited number of students, the start date, etc…

On the 1st webinar, my pitch was bad.

I only had about 10 slides for the course pitch.

Then with each webinar, I got better. By the 5th webinar, I had refined my pitch and had 62 slides about the course and 177 total slides.

This was Matt’s first course ever, and he hit it out of the park.

Worth considering something like this if you run an agency or some kind of service business: create your own paid training to share your processes and tactics with others 😎

But, like Matt, the first step would be to build up an audience, doesn’t have to be huge.

Because it’s hard to sell a course if nobody knows you or your expertise.

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