Lucia Stern

I'd been thinking of creating a course in Medical Editing for Pharma Advertising for a year or two. I'd been an editor for Pharma ad agencies for many years, and I wanted to stop doing it and find other ways to make a living. I did some writing, but my heart wasn't really in B2B copywriting, and so it felt like a chore. I had an idea of how I would teach it, but no idea about how to do the marketing, how to step-by-step get to where I was offering and then teaching a course. EPM really shocked me, and I had trouble trusting at first that I could find my audience, get people interested, even sign people up before actually creating the content (even though I had an outline). Worried that this wouldn't be possible, I created a survey on Google docs to gauge interest and learned a lot from the response--that I had to be more specific about what I was doing than "medical editing"! After I sent an introductory email and got some responses (from the people who'd answered my survey), I wrote another long email about what I'd be teaching and what I wouldn't be teaching, clarifying at the same time what Pharma advertising is and what it isn't, and why I was teaching specifically the skills you would need to work in that niche. Initially I thought I'd be eliminating a good portion of my respondents, but the effect was exactly the opposite: people were more interested and motivated after the clarification, and 17 people initially said yes, they'd sign up. A week or more went by before I got my payment page up and running (I decided to use Xperiencify because I didn't have a website for the purpose of the class, and it seemed to make the enterprise more legitimate to use the class platform. I'm not sorry, but it was more than I'd bargained for to try to figure out how to navigate, and took time. I polled the people who had said they intended to sign up to find out what the best time would be, and there was no clear time so I chose the 2 most popular responses, a midday time and an evening. I made the schedule an hour and fifteen minutes on each of the 2 days, and said I'd record the Zoom calls. The yeses I thought I had were slow to sign up, and then one person did. I sent out another email announcing the signup page again to not only those who responded to the scheduling messages (Doodle calendar) but to all of the 17 yeses, and got some additional signups, about 7. Then I decided to email everyone who had responded to the survey (about 120), and got additional responses, scheduled some phone calls, and talked for 4 hours to people who were having trouble deciding. In some cases I discouraged people who didn't sound as if it were the right time but were interested in the future. I said I'd keep them on the list. I started the course last Monday, January 24, with 12 students, which was in my max stretch range for my MVP. I made ~$6,000, tripling my investment in the course. For me, EPM was important because I was able to see how to start a business, how to lay the groundwork and get people interested in a Facebook group, and how that could be applied to other areas. There are still lots of challenges ahead: I am not very comfortable presenting on Zoom and I think I'd find it more comfortable to create videos and make modules, the way EPM is structured, than to try to teach everything in a live session, even though the videos are a lot of work. I debated at first about whether I wanted to teach editing or to do something with creativity--how to find your creative medium in art, something I plan to explore in the future that speaks to me more than editing. I am glad I chose a course topic that had fairly quick results, because never having been in business before I might have become discouraged. But not I would like to pursue an area that has some resonance for me. And I'd like to help my husband teach vegetarian cooking Persian-style.