Wes Kao’s winning strategy for leveraging your “bugs”
By Rachel Cai
Instructor Marketing
Summary
Learn how to levarge your "bugs" in your course creation and selling journey.
This article and exercise is based on Wes' blog post Turn bugs into features.
In software development, a bug is an error, problem, or unintended flaw in the computer program. When you get an error message, or something won’t load like it should—those are bugs.
Bugs are negative. The running inside joke is engineers will claim a bug is actually a feature.
That’s not necessarily true with software… But luckily in marketing and positioning, we actually can turn bugs into features. The best marketers and brands do this regularly.
When you turn bugs into features, the things you thought you were errors, constraints, liabilities about your course, could actually become selling points.
Turning bugs into features is a frame shift.
Features that you thought were initially bad might end up being what you emphasize. Those features might be perfect for a different kind of student or in a specific scenario. You can show your prospective students (and realize yourself) that X feature is actually exactly what certain students needed all along. By doing this, you increase perceived value and become more prized in your students’ mind.
Exercise: Goal setting & turning bugs into features
- What’s your 1 year vision for your course? For example:
- Make $100k teaching my course over 1 year
- Teach over 200 students
- Grow my cohorts to 75 students each
- What blockers, fears, or insecurities might get in the way of successfully building your course? For example:
- Time/schedule
- Experience
- Marketing & sales
- Teaching style
- For each blocker, fear, or insecurity, turn the bug into a feature. For example:
- 🚫 Bug: I’m not an expert in X. Other people have decades more experience.👍 Feature: The traditional methods of X aren’t working. I have a fresh perspective. I’ll invite the most innovative operators in this space to share their approach.
- 🚫 Bug: My course is too short. Students won’t get enough value. 👍 Feature: In my course, you’ll spend 1 full week doing and building. It’s more efficient to learn, do, iterate in an intensive and highly structured course.
For more on how to turn bugs into features, check out this video from Wes Kao.