When we launched our self-paced online training classes, we packaged them as focused courses that addressed a single pain point like:
- How to Tune Indexes and Speed Up SQL Server
- How to Read Query Plans
- DBA’s Guide to High Availability and Disaster Recovery
- Virtualization, SANs, and Hardware for DBAs
You paid a fixed price for the course you wanted, and you got access to it for 18 months. We figured you could learn a topic well across the span of a year and a half, and then pick which topic you wanted to tackle next.
You learned stuff about SQL Server, and we learned stuff about you.
You want to learn everything. After we released the Everything Bundle, it quickly turned into our biggest seller by far, accounting for over 80% of our sales. When we surveyed Everything Bundle buyers, they wrote comments like, “I love your style of teaching. Anything you want to teach me, I want to learn.” Alrighty then!
48% of you don’t want to pay up front. About half of the buyers said they want to pay a big chunk up front so that they only have to deal with their corporate expense process once. However, a lot of you would rather pay a monthly subscription fee.
You’re not good at managing your time. Let’s be honest, dear reader: every week, we get emails that say the same thing. “Can I get just another month or two? I’ve been really busy at work, and I didn’t watch a lot of the stuff I wanted to watch.” Even if you bought 18 months up front, you want to be able to add a few more months – especially when we’re adding new material.
I heard you loud and clear.
So this week, we’re taking our sales offline to make some changes. I’m excited to tell you all about it next week when we relaunch.
12 Comments. Leave new
Can’t wait to hear what you are coming up with!
As you said whatever your preaching, I am listening. Excited to see what’s coming.
Didn’t know I could gotten an extension for that training. I hope you retro-actively enable training. I bought one but never got around to watching it. 🙁
I too bought a course and I never had the chance to finish up, so I can relate. That said, 18 months is a fair enough window to set for expiration. I can understand why they don’t promote or publish an extension policy, they would have to treat each request independently.
I’d love to take the courses, but everything is presented via youtube. My company blocks youtube and most of my training occurs in the downtime at work. So I’ve had to find other avenues. I wish youtube had a corporate or training site that this type of content could live on making it easier to justify poking a hole in the company firewall.
It’s on Vimeo actually. If your company blocks Vimeo, you may want to talk to ’em about why.
Even with the bonus months I got when you switched LMS providers, I still did not watch everything before it expired. Still I would rather pay an amount and have access to things for a while than watch the bill hit my credit card every month with me never even logging in.
I have only recently signed up for some of your training and have to say it is every bit as good as I hoped it would be, and then some. I have been doing SQL Server DBA work for 13 years plus, and other RDBMSes even longer, but there’s been so many things that have been real eye openers. The same can be said for the blog as well.
I do have some suggestions for the training portal, though. What would be the best place to send such things to?
Keep it up your excellent work, it’s worth every bit of time and money I spend on it. (OK, it’s the company’s money, but still… You know 🙂 )
Sure, click on Contact at the top of the page. Thanks!
Ever think of partnering with Pluralsight? It’s my understanding their authors make decent income and a lot of us have Pluralsight subs…
Nah, because I wouldn’t own my sales & marketing channel. I’m really big on being able to run sales when I want, how I want, talk to my customers, and do things like grant access to our clients and our in-person training class students. With Pluralsight, you lose all those abilities.
And, uh, this: https://ozar.me/2017/03/another-million-dollars/
Man…I received this e-mail on Sunday 3/26 and although I was excited to see what the change was, I was very bummed out because my company had just approved to buy the Everything Bundle at the sale price it was at! Haha. Looking forward to the announcement.