Price the beginner track, or give it away and charge for step two?

Question

I've got twelve hours of recorded material on how to run a rental turnover, filmed for my own crew and then cleaned up. Two people outside the company have asked for access. So now I have to decide what the front of my thing looks like.

Option one is I sell the beginner track for something small, maybe $149, and treat it as the filter. People who pay show up. I've watched free webinars where half the room leaves in the first ten minutes and I don't want to teach that room. A small price also means the material has to be good, which keeps me honest about it.

Option two is I give the whole beginner track away, no email gate even, and only charge for the thing after it, live review of an actual turnover the student is running. The argument there is that information is close to free now and anyone can get the twelve hours somewhere else within a year. What isn't free is someone looking at your specific job and telling you the scope is wrong. If I charge $149 for the front I'm competing with a hundred people selling the same $149 and I lose that fight on marketing spend.

What makes me hesitate on the free version is that free attracts people who never intended to do anything, and then my community fills up with spectators. I've seen that happen to a friend's group and it went from useful to noise in about four months.

Both of these seem defensible to me and I keep switching. Where do you land.

monica_tran3 · Answer

Free but gated, and lantern I say that having done the $149 version for two years and killed it. The small price did filter, you're right about that. What it also did was set the frame that I sell recordings. Every conversation after that started from what does the next tier cost, and I spent more time defending price ladders than teaching. When I dropped the front to zero and put a four question form in front of it, the mix of people changed inside a month. The form is nothing clever, it asks what property they own or manage, what happened on their last turnover, what they want to be doing in a year, and how much time they have a week. Around a third of applicants don't finish it, which is the filter doing the work without me taking anyone's money for it. The people who do finish it show up to the paid review with real jobs and real numbers, and my close rate on that went from something like one in nine to one in three. The spectator problem you're worried about is real but it comes from open community access, not from free content. Keep the videos open, keep the room closed.

Price the beginner track, or give it away and charge for step two?

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