Story Grid

What if all course creators, universities and trainers actually held themselves responsible for their student's success?

What would this change?

This is what we decided to start doing at Story Grid last year.

Here are the insights after 10 months

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1) We cut 80%+ of our products.

All stand alone seminars, training, etc were taken off the market.

Everything now has 1-on-1 feedback.

This requires the student to actually do the training and homework and us to give them feedback so they will improve.

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2) My standard for our products 10x'd

No longer can we put something out that we think is good and if the students don't go through it our response is 🤷🏻‍♂️ that's on them.

We have to make our training so good that it actually causes change in the students.

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3) Our completion rate went to 94%.

Industry-wide, the numbers I've seen for completion of online courses is ~15%. Ours was in that range too.

Now we are at 94% and climbing. My goal is to be at 100% by the end of the year.

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4) We raised our prices significantly.

For us to walk week-by-week with our students through the training requires people and people are expensive. So we raised our prices to match this and our revenue is going up as more people signup to actually get the change promised.

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5) We hold our students to a high standard.

If they don't turn in their homework, we follow-up until they do. If they still don't turn in homework, we ask them to leave the program so someone that will do the homework can have their spot. We set these expectations at the start.

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6) The results are in.

We've seen huge increase in our student's writing ability. 100% of our workshop students agree they become significantly better during our program.

All those promises on the sales page that we make are actually coming true for our students.

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7) Students love it!

I've been running the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey since we made this change last year.

A good NPS score is 30.

A really good score is 40.

We are averaging 74 (and it's going up too).

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8) It's my responsibility, not theirs.

When I made it my responsibility that our students get the results we promised, everything changed.

I no longer felt right taking people's money that weren't getting the results that we promised.

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9) What if every course creator, university, training company, etc started thinking this way?

What if they judged their success not on enrollment numbers and revenue, but on outcome of their students?

How would that change things for the better?

10 months ago | [YT] | 38

Story Grid

My first Advance Reader Copy just arrived for my new book _The Shithead_ coming September 19th! 

The whole process for how I wrote and published it will be topics in upcoming videos.

11 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 83

Story Grid

The video covering all the bad writing advice from ON WRITING is dropping Friday. This one is next on the docket.

What’s your favorite bad writing advice from BIRD BY BIRD?

1 year ago | [YT] | 49

Story Grid

Since August 15th I've put out 27 videos (2 a week) on various writing tips and advice.

What would you like to see me cover over the next few months?

1 year ago | [YT] | 12

Story Grid

Working on a video covering all the bad writing advice in this book.

1 year ago | [YT] | 148