The Course Mentors Podcast

Why Live and Evergreen Models Both Fall Short

• The Course Mentors • Season 2 • Episode 9

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Live cohort or evergreen? If you’ve made your first few course sales, this question can feel impossible to answer.

In this episode, we break down what actually happens inside both models. The burnout that comes with constant live launching, the low urgency and flat results that often show up with evergreen, and why neither option is as simple or sustainable as it’s usually sold.

We walk through a third approach we’ve designed and tested ourselves, monthly recurring intakes with a capacity cap, and explain why it gives you the urgency and results of cohorts without the chaos, and the consistency of evergreen without relying on ads or massive audiences.

We talk about income stability, student experience, real scarcity, and what it looks like to run a course business that doesn’t consume your entire life. If you want predictable revenue, better student outcomes, and a model you can actually maintain long term, this episode will change how you think about course delivery.

Want to make your course idea a reality? We're enrolling limited spaces this month. Get on the waitlist: https://thecoursementors.com/application

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Course Mentors Podcast. I'm Odette. I'm Amy. And today we're tackling the question every course creator asks once they've made their first few sales. Should I run this as a live cohort or make it evergreen? And we're going to show you why the answer might be neither and both. Okay, first of all, for context, if you don't already know what a live round is or what an evergreen model is, we're going to talk about that just for just a moment before we tell you about what we do and why it's different. Because this decision will determine how much money you make, how much time you spend. And honestly, whether you burn out or build something sustainable, here's what most people do. They launch their course live, it goes well, and then they think, great, now I'll just make it evergreen so I can make money while I sleep. Passive income, baby. So they set up the evergreen funnel, they turn on ads and crickets, a sale here and there, but nothing like the live launch. Or maybe they go the other route. They run live cohorts, they make a lot of money, then they're really exhausted from launching every single month and showing up live consistently, and then they get stuck in a burnout trap. So today we're gonna break down both models, we're gonna talk to you about what they both are and what actually works in the online course world today. And then we're gonna introduce you to a third option that might just blow your mind. Okay. So let's start by understanding what we're actually comparing. So model one live cohort. So this is where you open enrollment for a specific period, everyone starts at the same time and you're actively involved. So live calls, group coaching, real-time support, think that sort of stuff. So I think of it like a college semester, say. So there's a start date, an end date, and you're all going through it together as a cohort. So that's live. So model number two is evergreen. This is the always open model. A lot of the time it'll be what like people call like passive income, evergreen, passive, you know? Um, so someone can buy your course any day of the year, go through it at their own pace, and you're not actively involved beyond pre-recorded content and maybe some email support, if that. So think of it like a Netflix show. It's always available. You watch it whenever you want. Both models can work, but both have significant drawbacks. So talk talk to me about the drawbacks, Amy. Okay, so with the live model, what we see, what we've experienced, because we've tried both of these models ourselves before we invented our model, obviously. For me, there was a hell of a lot of launch burnout. So when you're constantly in launch mode, you are promoting, you are selling, you are showing up, you're delivering, it's exhausting. You are going from helping students, jumping on live calls to preparing ad content to preparing Instagram content. And it's all very strict on a tight schedule. It's fast, it's a lot, it's very, and it seems like, okay, yeah, I could do that, I could do that. But with launches, you truly have a feast or famine income. So you make all of your money during that cart open or launch period, and then nothing until the next one. So you actually constantly have to be working extremely hard. You are either working extremely hard to bring that money in, or you're working extremely hard to support your students. And you're doing those two things all the time. It's hard to plan your finances and it's hard to get the energy to keep doing it because as an online course business owner, I mean, really the buck stops at you. Like it is you. You are the one supporting your students, you are the one driving the income. It is hard work. It's also quite time-intensive. You're on live calls every day or every week, answering questions in real time. If you're doing launches right, so if you are actually making a lot of money in this model, that inevitably means there's a lot of students in your course. Those two things have to exist together. So if there's a lot of students in your course, that means there's a lot of support that's involved. So that support can be coming in day, night, when you sleep, when you're on the toilet. You have to answer those questions all the time. And it is quite draining. So your schedule is dictated by your cohort schedule, and that's a lot. And also, it's very, very hard to scale these kind of launch models, these live cohorts. It's really, really hard. Think about like again, a college course or a university. It is incredibly hard to scale a university because how do you scale a university? You have to get more enrollments in. And how do you get more enrollments? You have to hire more teachers. So, this is a really hard way to scale a business. And it's why I've seen a lot of course creators make 50K in a live cohort launch and then nothing again for six months, and then 50K, and then nothing for six months. So really, they could have just had a hundred K a year job. It's just not sustainable. Now let's talk Evergreen. So with Evergreen, again, there's a lot of problems as well, but ultimately the biggest one is lower conversions. So when there's no deadline, when there's no live cohort, when there's nothing pushing anyone towards doing it, there's no urgency. And with online courses, if there's no urgency, they will just buy it later. And I think the problem with this, with a lower conversion, is that when we look at conversion rates and mathematics and how these businesses and online education businesses work, right? If you have lower conversions, which means less people are buying, the only way to make money then is to get more eyeballs. That is just the facts of it. Because if less people are buying, you need more people looking at it to actually make the sales that you want to buy. And to get more eyeballs, you either have to spend a shit ton of money on ads, or you have to be the biggest marketing genius ever, or have somehow an existing community of a million followers. And if you don't have any of those things, a massive ads budget or a huge marketing team behind you or a massive audience, it never works. So again, you will get a lot of lower conversions, but you'll also get worse results. So students are going through the course on their own at their own pace with no accountability. What happens? Completion rates tank. No one does anything because there's no urgency and there's no motivation for them to get better and do the work. Also, again, with Evergreen, you also have lower prices. You cannot charge premium prices for self-based courses. No one is paying$2,000 for a full module course they can go through on their own with no support. It's just not possible. It's also expensive to maintain because, again, you have to pay for the ads, the funnels, the email sequences, the automations. It requires a huge technical setup that you then have to keep powered with a lot of money. So I think with Evergreen, it works really, really well if you have someone who has a massive audience already and you have, you know, your Amy Porterfield with a million followers, then it's great. Yeah, works perfectly. But if you are someone who doesn't have that, it's really hard. 100%. It feels like you have to choose high income or time freedom. Great results or scalability. But what if you didn't have to choose? I feel like we need a drum roll, but really we talk about this all the time. So it should come as no surprise. Odette and I, we work with the recurring intake model. And it's something that we designed ourselves. It's not something that we see a lot of people doing or anyone else doing. It's something we designed. And honestly, it is life-changing. I feel like I can say that. We don't run traditional live cohorts and we don't run a pure evergreen system either. We run monthly recurring intakes with a capacity cap, which that sounds like a lot, I know. Here's how it works. So every month we open enrollment. You have until the end of the month to join or until we hit our student cap, 10 students, whichever comes first. Once you're in, you start at the beginning of the following month. So if you uh join on the 15th of November, you'll start December one. So once you're in, start at the beginning of the following month with everyone else who joined that intake period. Simple but incredibly effective. So why this model changes everything? So breaking it down, why it works so much better than either traditional model. Number one, consistent urgency without constant launching. It's not a time-based urgency, it's a gap on the amount of places that you are offering in your course. And you might think, you know, 10 seems low, but we we do more students in our other courses, but 10 is what we want to manage with the amount of support that we give. So that however many students you choose will likely be dictated by the amount of support that you give in your course, that you choose to give in your course. You have a natural urgency in your business. It doesn't matter what you're teaching or what it is that you do in your course, you have a natural urgency. There is no one that could have 300 people join their course today and then also next month and the month after and the month after and manage all of those people. It's not possible. You have a natural cap that's normal. So, really, what we do specifically is we just build that consistent but also authentic urgency that actually exists. That's not a lie, it's not fake, and it's not constant launching. 100%. So with traditional cohorts, you launch three to four times per year, maybe once a quarter. That means most of the year nobody can buy from you, which is mental to me. Why would you shut yourself off from sales for one day of the year? It's crazy. So with Evergreen, you can buy anytime, like we've said, which means there's no reason to buy now. With monthly intakes, there's always urgency. If you want to start in January, you need to join by December 31st. Or if we hit capacity, too bad, so sad, you'll have to wait until the next month. You know, it's it's natural, it it exists. What didn't make sense to us when we were first starting out in courses was why are we having to only launch once every you know quarter? That's crazy. I want to I want more students more often, you know. Um Evergreen was like, no way, I I want to to see my students. So basically it all made sense. And if you're not in launch mode, you're not creating a big promotional push every month. The system's just open. People see your content, they're interested, and when they're ready to buy, there's a natural deadline approaching. Okay, number two, benefit number two is fresh cohorts with minimal extra work. So every month a new group starts and they go through together. They have that cohort energy and community, but you are not delivering live content every single month to every single cohort. Your course content is still pre-recorded and the lessons are already made. What changes each month is the community course, the QA sessions, and the group support. So you get the best of both worlds, the results and the conversion of cohorts without redoing all the teaching every single time. Absolutely. Number three, consistent revenue. That's a big one. So instead of making 30K maybe in a launch twice a year, you're making your 30K every single month. Your income smooths out. You can plan, you can breathe, you can manage it really easily. There's no feast or famine, just consistent monthly revenue. Benefit number four, and I think this is something that Dad and I just screamed about for months and months and months on the internet. You are never closed. It's something that just doesn't make sense to us that online course businesses can sometimes close. That's really weird. With traditional cohorts, when someone finds you in March, but your next cohort doesn't start until June, you just lose the sale. There's, I'm not gonna fluff around about that. If someone puts their name down and you are not open within the next 24 hours, you they're gonna go somewhere else. They've got a problem that they want to solve. They're going somewhere else.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

It makes me crazy because you've done all the hard work to convince them that they should do a course, but sorry, you can't do it for another two months. They're just gonna go to your competitor and give them the sale. It's mental. With monthly intakes, the longest they ever have to wait is a few weeks. While it's oftentimes enough urgency to push them to actually make the sale now, if they don't make the sale right now and something maybe, you know, they need to save a few more dollars, they need to talk to someone about it, whatever, whatever that is, they still only have to wait a few more weeks to start your next intake, which is fantastic. Yeah, 100%. Um, number five, the capacity cap creates scarcity and like we said, real scarcity. Just like a course, a university doesn't have 1,000 students, you know, per semester. You can't put a thousand people in a classroom. Exactly. So here's the magic of a 30-person cap or a 20 or a 10 person cap. When you limit enrollment, you create real scarcity. Not fake. This offer expires at midnight scarcity. It's an online business. People are thinking, why does it expire at midnight? Why? Why I've never met anyone in my life that could explain that question to me. Why is it expiring at midnight? Yeah, yeah. Actually, we only have eight spots left this month. Scarcity. That makes sense. And it's true. By the first week of the month, eight spots left. You need to get in, you need to get this done now. You need to take your place. So here's what happens people who were on the fence suddenly decide because they don't want to wait another month, they don't want to miss out. Plus, big one, it protects your sanity. It's not only convenient for your customer, which is something you want to do if you're trying to sell something to them. That's also just quietly, you know, back to basics, everyone. Uh, but but it's also it's protecting your sanity. You know, month on month, it rolls, it's smooth. You're never overwhelmed with a hundred new students all at once, all sending you admin emails that you have to answer. Someone's cat died, they need a refund, somebody needs to start in another month. None of that. It's none of that's fairly predictable. As a system, you end up enrolling the same number of people every month with the same income, which means you can scale things so easily. You can say, well, actually, next month I'll take on an extra five people. It's easy. But you also know what 30 people a month looks like from support. You know that, okay, I've got three live calls this month. I know exactly what that's gonna entail, I know exactly who's gonna show up, I know what the community is gonna look like this month, I know what kind of questions I'm gonna have to answer. I can plan my life around my one hour of emails in the morning. You can plan those things. When you have live launches or evergreen, you cannot predict it. And you can end up having weeks where you're blocked out at a laptop and then weeks where you have no sales and nothing's coming in. It can just be really, really unpredictable. So again, yeah, looking after yourself and your sanity is really, really important. And I also want to take a second to paint what a picture of the student experience looks like from someone who is going to be buying your program. So let's talk about Sarah. Sarah is a very white girl name. I can say that because my name is Amy Jessica, which is the whitest white girl name of all time. But Sarah is also, if I had a Sarah in my name, or maybe even a Mary, we'd be it'd be very white. Okay, Sarah. So she discovers your course on Instagram on November 15th, which is like, I don't know, yesterday. Okay. She is interested in your course, right? So she maybe sees an ad from you, or maybe she comes in from a YouTube video. It doesn't matter. She comes onto your Instagram page and she likes what you are putting down. She's interested. She checks out your sales page. She sees on the page, joined by November 30th to start December 1st with the next cohort. There's only 12 spots remaining. She does the quick math. Okay, all right. I've got 15 days to enroll. There's 12 spots. Okay, all right. She thinks about it for a few days. Normal. No one is spending thousands of dollars, hundreds of dollars without thinking about it. They're thinking about it, okay? She comes back on November 22nd. So it's been a week-ish. And now it says only six spots remaining. She does not want to wait until January because now she's thinking, okay, I can either get in now, start December 1st, or I have to wait all the way until a new year. So she just joins. December 1st rolls around. Sarah and 29 other students all get a welcome email. Welcome to December's cohort. Here's your cohort group chat. Here are your fellow students. Let's do this together. So exciting. Okay. Woo! Exciting. They go through the pre-recorded lessons at their own pace during the month, but they're all doing it at the same time. They're chatting in the group, they're celebrating wins together. There are two group QA's that month where you shopped live to answer questions and coach them through sticking points. So, from your perspective, you've put in two hours live and maybe a couple of hours here and there doing emails, okay? By the end of December, Sarah has completed the course, she has gotten results, and she has made friends with three other students in her cohort. She did not have to wait six months for the next opening. She didn't feel like she was alone going through this in an evergreen course. And you didn't have to recreate anything from scratch for her. Everybody wins in this scenario. Sarah's happy, you're happy, everyone's happy. Amazing. That was a beautiful portrait you painted, Amy. Thank you. Thank you. Now let's wrap things up. We've we've talked enough at you, I think, for this podcast. So here's your takeaway for this podcast. In a nutshell, you don't have to choose between live launching and evergreen. There's another way we invented it. Monthly recurring intakes with a capacity cap give you the best of both worlds. That's why we invented it the way we did. The urgency and the results of the cohorts with the consistency and the freedom of Evergreen. It's all wrapped up in our recurring intake model. You're not constantly launching, you're not burning out, you're not leaving money on the table. Worst. You're building a sustainable course business that serves your students and doesn't consume your entire life. It's super manageable. So life cohorts and Evergreen both work, but there's a better way, there's a much better way, a way that lets you make consistent money, support students properly, and actually enjoy running your course business. Especially because when you've got things running this smoothly, month on month, things are predictable. You can start to work on the fun things like scaling. You can make cool masterclasses that get even cooler students into your course. It's that old thing of work on your business, not in your business, when you have such a smooth system set up. Your future students are out there right now and they're waiting for the right time to join. Don't make them wait six months and don't burn yourself out trying to be everywhere at once. Find your rhythm, set your cap, build something sustainable, and go and create that system. That's it from us, guys. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you've got any questions about it, feel free to slide into our DMs. We're always here to chat. And we'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye, guys.