Five Before Five turns one this week! When I was contemplating starting my own online business, I researched how long it would take to gain traction on the internet. The answer I heard last January: two years. I was told that if you put out high quality information on the internet every week for two years, you will have built a tribe of 1000 true fans, and you’ll never have to rely on a paycheck to support yourself again.

Reading that and living it are two different things, of course. It was scary to leave the familiarity of a paycheck and jump into the unknown world of entrepreneurship. Getting this newsletter out every week requires discipline and determination (and a speaking gig in Cincinnati pushed my release date to Saturday this week).

I am just one year in, but alhamdulillah, things are starting to pick up steam. We just launched our latest online Masterclass, Barakah-Boosted Study Skills (BBSS), and it is our best-selling product yet. We sold 23 of the 25 seats, and the course has mashAllah brought in nearly $11K in revenue.

I imagine some readers may be contemplating starting their own online business or wondering how to launch a course. I know I have benefited tremendously from articles where entrepreneurs take you behind the scenes and share the anatomy of their launches.

Thus, for this week's FBF, I will share the playbook we used for our first 5-figure course.

1) Email List as the Backbone of the Business

In the influencer era, many people think that amassing a huge social media following is the key to monetization. While there is no doubt that social media can build brand awareness, the reality is if you build your empire based on the back of Insta, YouTube, Medium, or TikTok, it's a house upon the sand. You can be de-platformed and lose your entire audience overnight.

The key to building a sustainable business is remarkably simple: grow a high-quality email list. People have been predicting the death of email for decades, but the fact remains that email has the single highest ROI of any medium. When you build an email list, you own access to your customers that nobody can take away.

Of course, you must nurture your list and provide value; that's why I send a high-quality email with expert college admissions tips with an Islamic flavor every Monday & Thursday.

By frequently reaching out and, inshAllah, providing value, I want to go from an unwelcome pest to a welcome guest. Alhamdullilah, based on our open rate and click-throughs, we seem to be on the right track.

2) Webinars as Lead Magnets

The natural question that follows is how to build an email list. The most potent tool I have found is webinars.

In the lead-up to launching BBSS, I hosted 3 webinars:

* Barakah Secrets Series 1: Five Key Steps for Smarter Studying (390 registrants)

* Barakah Secrets Series 2: Insights from Three Academic All-Stars (366 registrants)

* Barakah Secrets Series 3: Learning How to Learn with Imam Zaid Shakir (276 registrants)

We had a combined 1032 registrants with more than 50% live attendance. These webinars grew my email list by nearly 40% to more than 2K subs. These are mostly high-quality leads of my exact target demographic: American Muslims with high school age children who are thinking about college.

The other benefit of webinars is they are an opportunity to sell your product. Roughly half of the course sales came directly from the webinars in which we explained the benefits of the class. I am not done with it yet, but the best book I have come across about how to structure webinars is Jason Fladlien’s One to Many.

3) WhatsApp as Distribution Platform

You have to know where your customer lives, and Muslims live on WhatsApp. Nearly every Muslim I know is in dozens of WhatsApp groups.

The key to WhatsApp marketing is you need your messages to look different than everything else. Most masjid events are quickly thrown together flyers that are often missing critical info.

There are formatting tricks (bold, italics, bullet points) that can make your messages visually appealing.

Most important of all, the content needs to be genuinely appealing, clearly highlighting the benefits event participants will take away.

I write, rewrite, and edit my WhatsApp messages, agonizing over every word. Once it’s ready, I send the message to all my groups roughly 3 days before the event. On the day of, I send out a short reminder message with a flyer and the registration link.

For this last round, I added a game-changing wrinkle by building a broadcast list of all my Muslim contacts on WhatsApp. Unlike group messages which often get lost in the daily deluge of posts, broadcast messages get delivered individually to everyone who has saved your name as a contact.

Zoom allows you to include a pixel to track where registrations are coming from. As you can see from this data from one webinar, our WhatsApp broadcasts were the most effective way to get the word out.

4) The Wisdom of Tiered Pricing

Once you've gotten as many people as possible into your event, you need to actually sell the class. This is probably the part of the process I'm least comfortable with and have the most room for improvement.

One change that I made for the latest class was the introduction of a tiered pricing model. We had 3 levels of the class:

* Do-it-Yourself ($447: live attendance at the class)

* Do-it-Together ($597: accountability partner, working session, instructor feedback on assignments)

* Do-it-One-on-One ($1097: all of the above plus weekly 30 min one-on-ones)

As I might have predicted, the middle tier was the most popular. But we sold 4 out of the 5 seats for the Do-It-One-on-One tier as well.

We also offered a pay-what-you-can price for Tier 1, which allowed students from Nigeria and Pakistan to attend as well as a 7th grade boy who is using his Eid money to pay his own way.

Overall, this 3-tiered pricing model worked well, and I anticipate using it in future launches.

5) Read, Read, Read

Far harder than launching a course is figuring out how to solve the most pressing problems for your target audience.

In this case, my wife and I decided to teach study skills with an Islamic twist. Academic success often comes at a major cost. The pursuit of top grades takes over the lives of many top students, sucking up the oxygen from other pursuits. Others lose motivation when they don’t see their studying pay off.

We wanted to teach students how they could blend Prophetic wisdom with modern science-backed study skills to unlock barakah in their studies that would allow them to get twice the results in half the time. Learning how to learn will help them work smarter, not harder, and win back time to pursue passion projects that are both more fun and more interesting to admissions officers.

To prepare for the class, we spent months reading books on the topic. Here are a few of the best:

1) Productive Muslim by Mohamed Faris

2) How to Be a High School Superstar by Cal Newport

3) Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley

4) Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal

5) How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport

6) Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown et al.

To have a truly successful course launch, the most important ingredient is to design a truly beneficial course. Long before your first webinar, you need to put in the work by reading, researching, building, and constantly adding value.

May Allah put barakah in our students’ time and may He fulfill the amana they have entrusted us with. May He allow all parents to invest in building their children’s skills so they can thrive in this world and the next. Ameen.

Until next Friday, inshAllah.

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