I'm happy to answer questions, as always, but would prefer talking about the business of doing this rather than about the product. (I'm not comfortable selling on HN.) I'll probably blog about it in more detail later, too.
I've been following your blog, podcasts, comments here, etc and learn a lot from you. I've gotta say you hit a big need with the email course, and though I wish the price was $99 I know you're delivering based on value and the course is probably worth more than the $300 price to me. So, I'll probably get it. I think a sample video from the course (ie., 5 minutes would help a lot) to help people take the leap. Or a 2 minute intro video to the course. There's something about video (especially when the author's face comes and he starts talking) that adds more legitimacy and seriousness to the offer.
That's the opposite of what I expect but, since it is entirely possible that video + text does outperform text, there's A/B tests running to that effect.
Just bought the course and I'm downloading some of the videos because I watch most of my videos on the go (ie., in the car or on my ipad).
First impressions (ie., first 60 seconds on the course), it really seems like something created for a person sitting at a computer to watch it all. I wish there was a downloadable zip file I could download all the videos at once. I'm trying to download the videos now and I'm running into all sorts of errors and such (I think it's only letting me download one video at a time). Actually I'm getting error messages right now for all the pages. Is your site down?
Update: Ok, it looks like it's back up and running. When I download videos and try to right-click to save mp4 file, it downloads an html file and not the video. I need to go into the video to watch it and then option-return the url to start downloading. Very strange. This happens to the opt-in videos in lesson 2. optins-teardowns video doesn't seem to be downloading at all.
Also, your video sizes are really large. Example, 235mb for an 8:10 minute video (1024x768 resolution). You should be able to get the file size down to 100mb or so. For comparison, Kevin Rose's interview of Dennis Crowley in 720p is about the same size, 237mb, but the interview is about 20 minutes.
Your copywriting video is 686mb for 19:53 length... compared with Kevin Rose's Dennis Crowley video of 235mb for 19:20 length. That makes your video 3x the size of Kevin Rose's video (which is great 720p quality).
Honestly, this is a really sucky first experience. This is going to take my all morning to download these videos because the file sizes are 2-3x what they should be and because the links aren't all working.
And then after I download the videos, since they're so large I'm going to have a hard time fitting them in my iPhone and iPad. Please investigate getting your file sizes down. I think you can shrink the file sizes of your mp4 video to 1/3 the current size but keep the same resolution/quality.
Update: Your optins-teardowns.mp4 file is absent. I can't download it. Please fix cause I don't want to watch the lessons out of order.
Patrick, that video is far too long and does a lot to damage your perceived value. At a number of points you wander off into "includes material on...", rather than "solve X problem using some means" language.
You repeatedly drum into people that they shouldn't be just rails programmers who know skills foo, bar and baz, but rather people who solve business problems. You forgot that lesson in the video.
I'm not at the stage with my business that this'll be useful - but will be soon enough and email will be my primary sales channel. Otherwise this does look like excellent material.
Note, my criticism comes from a place of love. It's your first attempt and feedback will help you improve. Best of luck.
In multiple tests, I have seen the video + long sales copy move the needle as much as 70% on final sales. As of yet, I have not run a test that does not increase by at least 20%. Details NDA, YMMV
Any reason you decided to launch this on a Friday? Or just random? I'm wondering what kind of data people have seen for the best day of the week to attract attention to a launch.
It was supposed to be launched weeks ago, and I was hoping for a Tuesday, but a) waterfall development sucks even more for videos than for software, b) we totally blew the ship date about four times as a consequence, and c) I step on a plane to America in ~12 hours so I wanted to get it launched prior to the next several weeks of conferences & etc.
I clicked the link a few hours ago, got an error, figured you'd fix it, waited, but still get it now. There's a little box that says "We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly." Apparently I'm the only one, but I can't get to the site.
It should be up now. Long story short: had a SPoF, it held up to the HNing pretty admirably but enough people actually started downloading enough movies at once to kill the SPoF and that caused sporadic degradation of the site.
