- Joined
- Mar 1, 2013
- Messages
- 1,819
I know what happened but not too sure if Chase wants that information disclosed at all. I can't imagine he'd have a problem explaining what happened but that's a call for him to make. Same situation with bootcamps and taking on students; that's a call for him to make.
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2012
- Messages
- 6,275
Hey fellas,
Ricardus launched his own web-based business in a different niche / different language, and is doing really well. His business's revenues are about 3x to 4x GC's, with profits even higher. Mostly on autopilot these days. He could be my boss now.
He was considering launching his own pickup product offering at one point (which we'd have happily promoted!), however after chatting with a lot of the guys in the space he opted not to do so... pickup/dating is a pretty tough market to do well in. Many of the guys who already are doing okay running businesses in this space have made their exits or are looking to. Ric opted to double down on his current business and just see how big he could get it. He's fast becoming one of the heavyweights in his market. We've chatted about but he's pretty doubtful about ever coming back to pickup at this point. He actually ran our phone coaching for about a year after he quit writing articles, but eventually his business took off and his time became too valuable for that too.
Re: the "I know what happened" statement from Richard... not sure if you mean the instability in 2012? That may have sped up his departure but it's not the reason for it. He'd been studying Internet marketing for a year already at that point and had already quit his other jobs (that paid more, but demanded more time) to begin building his marketing material. If re: instability, GC was running heavy in the red in 2012, and I was $60K in startup debt personally without an income source and closing every business I was involved in that wasn't making money or couldn't be made to soon. I let Ricardus know we might need to close GC or otherwise lay off the folks who were working on it and cut costs down to zero... I just couldn't keep working on it if it meant I kept getting ever-deeper in the hole. I changed our homepage in late July that year and it almost doubled revenues nearly overnight, which saved the business and got us profitable for the first time, but by that point Ric was on his way out (he actually had a goal of "get $10K in the bank, and then quit everything to focus on the new business", and as soon as he hit it he hung his spurs up. Only reason we didn't announce his departure is we weren't sure how the new business launch would go, if it'd be a success or a flop, and whether or not he'd come back later).
Re: training, four of our authors do offer phone coaching:
https://www.girlschase.com/coaching/phone
I've had various guys who studied Girls Chase come to me and propose being coaches for us in various cities in the U.S. and Europe. I've chatted with a few of them (one of them recently) but the main reason we don't do it is it's often a low margin business, it's a LOT of work to set up, schedule, and manage, and coaches burn out. Most of the biggest pickup companies shut down their coaching arms for these reason; there are only a few larger companies that still maintain these (RSD, AoC, and PUA Training being the 3 biggest so far as I'm aware).
I'm pretty iffy on us ever getting a coaching wing going at this point. On the one hand, it'd be a lot of fun, and it's probably one of the best ways to build a really loyal following of alumni and connect with some truly outstanding guys. On the other hand, it's a monster to run and organize, and profits after paying the coach and all the expenses are slim (which makes all the tough running and organizing even harder to justify). At the same time, I have another major GC program (our big new flagship video series) that's getting most of my biz dev time and have had to slash even minor side projects that demanded some of my time/focus away from it (like Girls Chase Magazine on iTunes, which really only sucked up about 10 hours a month but required me interacting with an entire extra project team each month and paying more to run than it took in).
So, for those reasons, at this point, I don't view it as all that likely for us to get into in-field coaching, much as I know a small number of guys who are interested in that will be disappointed. The numbers just don't make sense for it to happen though.
Chase
Ricardus launched his own web-based business in a different niche / different language, and is doing really well. His business's revenues are about 3x to 4x GC's, with profits even higher. Mostly on autopilot these days. He could be my boss now.
He was considering launching his own pickup product offering at one point (which we'd have happily promoted!), however after chatting with a lot of the guys in the space he opted not to do so... pickup/dating is a pretty tough market to do well in. Many of the guys who already are doing okay running businesses in this space have made their exits or are looking to. Ric opted to double down on his current business and just see how big he could get it. He's fast becoming one of the heavyweights in his market. We've chatted about but he's pretty doubtful about ever coming back to pickup at this point. He actually ran our phone coaching for about a year after he quit writing articles, but eventually his business took off and his time became too valuable for that too.
Re: the "I know what happened" statement from Richard... not sure if you mean the instability in 2012? That may have sped up his departure but it's not the reason for it. He'd been studying Internet marketing for a year already at that point and had already quit his other jobs (that paid more, but demanded more time) to begin building his marketing material. If re: instability, GC was running heavy in the red in 2012, and I was $60K in startup debt personally without an income source and closing every business I was involved in that wasn't making money or couldn't be made to soon. I let Ricardus know we might need to close GC or otherwise lay off the folks who were working on it and cut costs down to zero... I just couldn't keep working on it if it meant I kept getting ever-deeper in the hole. I changed our homepage in late July that year and it almost doubled revenues nearly overnight, which saved the business and got us profitable for the first time, but by that point Ric was on his way out (he actually had a goal of "get $10K in the bank, and then quit everything to focus on the new business", and as soon as he hit it he hung his spurs up. Only reason we didn't announce his departure is we weren't sure how the new business launch would go, if it'd be a success or a flop, and whether or not he'd come back later).
Re: training, four of our authors do offer phone coaching:
https://www.girlschase.com/coaching/phone
I've had various guys who studied Girls Chase come to me and propose being coaches for us in various cities in the U.S. and Europe. I've chatted with a few of them (one of them recently) but the main reason we don't do it is it's often a low margin business, it's a LOT of work to set up, schedule, and manage, and coaches burn out. Most of the biggest pickup companies shut down their coaching arms for these reason; there are only a few larger companies that still maintain these (RSD, AoC, and PUA Training being the 3 biggest so far as I'm aware).
I'm pretty iffy on us ever getting a coaching wing going at this point. On the one hand, it'd be a lot of fun, and it's probably one of the best ways to build a really loyal following of alumni and connect with some truly outstanding guys. On the other hand, it's a monster to run and organize, and profits after paying the coach and all the expenses are slim (which makes all the tough running and organizing even harder to justify). At the same time, I have another major GC program (our big new flagship video series) that's getting most of my biz dev time and have had to slash even minor side projects that demanded some of my time/focus away from it (like Girls Chase Magazine on iTunes, which really only sucked up about 10 hours a month but required me interacting with an entire extra project team each month and paying more to run than it took in).
So, for those reasons, at this point, I don't view it as all that likely for us to get into in-field coaching, much as I know a small number of guys who are interested in that will be disappointed. The numbers just don't make sense for it to happen though.
Chase
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2014
- Messages
- 1,982
@Chase,
I would like to do some pickup coaching, for the same reason as I tutor at the uni, not for the cash but for the experience. I originally conceived this as a "hobby business" with little upfront investment, but after trying to advertise my services and have a website created and running into problems, I realized that I will need to invest quite a lot of time and effort upfront, so I put the project on hold for a while. One possibility is to forget about advertising and a website and just get out and cold-approach dudes till I find some customers, but that also seems quite a high investment in time that isn't paid upfront. So I'm keen to hear if you have any tips how you found customers when you used to do pickup coaching. Also to know about licencing your material, I did submit a query a while back through the main site but haven't had an answer yet as far as I'm aware.
Ray
I would like to do some pickup coaching, for the same reason as I tutor at the uni, not for the cash but for the experience. I originally conceived this as a "hobby business" with little upfront investment, but after trying to advertise my services and have a website created and running into problems, I realized that I will need to invest quite a lot of time and effort upfront, so I put the project on hold for a while. One possibility is to forget about advertising and a website and just get out and cold-approach dudes till I find some customers, but that also seems quite a high investment in time that isn't paid upfront. So I'm keen to hear if you have any tips how you found customers when you used to do pickup coaching. Also to know about licencing your material, I did submit a query a while back through the main site but haven't had an answer yet as far as I'm aware.
Ray
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2012
- Messages
- 6,275
@ Ray-
I'm 95% certain I sent you a reply and CC'd Genaro - I remember seeing your message come in a while back. Anyway, I'll check email again whenever I'm next on there.
@ Radeng-
I will forward your thanks along to Ricardus! He likes getting those.
@ Tayo-
We can see that data, yeah. It isn't always well-correlated with who'll spend money for a program (or workshop). e.g., our highest traffic city, by at least 3x as much as the second city in the list, is Delhi, India, with India nevertheless contributing a shockingly meager 0.016% of website revenues. Even within the West, we probably have nearly as much traffic from Houston, Texas as Toronto, Ontario, but I'd bet my soup bowl there are 4x or 5x more guys who want to sign up for bootcamps in Toronto than there are in Houston.
One of the things you learn after a little while in web business (probably took me 3 or 4 years to really figure out) is traffic ≠ revenues, unless you're running a CPM advertising-supported business like AskMen.com or the MSM (and I don't want us to go the route of monetizing via advertisements just to get traffic = revenues, because the next natural step after that is for the business to become a total clickwhore, and that's neither interesting to me, nor sustainable over the long-term).
Chase
I'm 95% certain I sent you a reply and CC'd Genaro - I remember seeing your message come in a while back. Anyway, I'll check email again whenever I'm next on there.
@ Radeng-
I will forward your thanks along to Ricardus! He likes getting those.
@ Tayo-
We can see that data, yeah. It isn't always well-correlated with who'll spend money for a program (or workshop). e.g., our highest traffic city, by at least 3x as much as the second city in the list, is Delhi, India, with India nevertheless contributing a shockingly meager 0.016% of website revenues. Even within the West, we probably have nearly as much traffic from Houston, Texas as Toronto, Ontario, but I'd bet my soup bowl there are 4x or 5x more guys who want to sign up for bootcamps in Toronto than there are in Houston.
One of the things you learn after a little while in web business (probably took me 3 or 4 years to really figure out) is traffic ≠ revenues, unless you're running a CPM advertising-supported business like AskMen.com or the MSM (and I don't want us to go the route of monetizing via advertisements just to get traffic = revenues, because the next natural step after that is for the business to become a total clickwhore, and that's neither interesting to me, nor sustainable over the long-term).
Chase