In this video, we get an inside look at Adam Hudson’s membership site that has brought in over 60 million dollars in just five years, made a 15-year-old a millionaire, and helped thousands of others start a profitable Amazon business.
Adam and his business partner Joe launched Reliable Education in 2016 with a vision to deliver genuine business training that would create long-term success for students.
They saw a landscape where too many online courses live on false promises and short-term “wins”. They instead set out to create programs that were honest, straightforward and gave the lessons and guidance needed for true sustained results.
Today, Reliable Education has grown into a tight-knit community of inspiring entrepreneurs from over 40 countries and a body of high-quality business education inside their online Academy.
Adam shares parts of that story along with how he ended up getting to where he is today. A large part of it was focusing on creating honest and well-produced content that would impact those consuming it.
In the 5 years Reliable Education has been in business, they’ve helped over 15,000 students sell a collective total of $1.5 billion on Amazon.
If you want to learn more about Reliable Education, visit their website https://Reliable.Education and make sure to watch the FULL video above. We’ve done our best to cover the highlights and important ideas, but there was such an overwhelming amount of value we had trouble condensing it down. I can guarantee your membership site will be changed for the better if you implement the ideas Adam shared.
Important Lessons & Highlights Shared In This Video
3:34 – How a strong community and awards program has propelled rapid growth
Adam says, and we’d agree, that adults don’t get recognized for much these days. When someone achieves something great, and they’re recognized, it not only motivates them to keep going but motivates others to do the same.
Reliable Education offers awards for different tiers of Amazon sales, which is what they’re teaching students how to do. They get an award when they make their first $1,000, then $10,000/month, $25,000/month, $50,000/month, $100/month, and the final award is 1 million per year.
Each award has its own unique name with the final award being called the “White Rhino” which ties back into their branding.
To tie this back to your membership site, you should find a way to award and recognize your members for their successes however you can. It doesn’t have to be an in-person awards program like Adam is doing, but it could be shouting them out on your social media, giving them a printable certificate, or even mailing them a physical award.
10:35 – Why is Reliable Education’s training so good? Why do people have success with your program and not others?
Adam explains that when he was first starting Reliable Education, he wanted to make sure he did it the right way because many of the courses in the ‘make money online’ niche are extremely snakey and slimy, as he put it.
He wanted to make sure that everything he did was honest, upfront and produced to the best of his ability. They set extremely high standards for everything.
In fact, on their studio wall they have in ten-foot letters “World’s Best Amazon Training.” That doesn’t just mean the way it looks, but it’s the content, it’s the results that are being produced, it’s the recognition you give your students and it’s the vibe of the community.
Explain another way, Adam was frustrated with the massive gap between the marketing of online courses and the experience of going through the content, so he wanted to develop a reputation of producing a product that behind the paywall is as good or better than in front of the paywall.
When it comes to starting out, he says it is fine to record with your iPhone, but take steps to make it the highest quality as possible. If you maintain that mindset and stay consistent, you’ll have a far better chance at success than most.
12:45 – Qualifying Members to Make Sure They Could Succeed
One interesting strategy they implemented to make sure people going through the course would succeed is qualifying them.
Adam shares that for the first three years, they interviewed every single person that bought the course (which was a couple grand) And they’d say the first thing you have to do is do an interview.
They spent about $100 a call out of that $2,000 to interview each one and find out who they were, what their expectations were, that they had enough money to actually buy inventory. And if they didn’t, they refunded them. Adam says they gave away $2 million worth of refunds in the first three years of the business proactively.
But as a result of that, they had a community that was able to execute what they were teaching.
Depending on how high-ticket your offer is, you may consider doing something like this. At first, you may lose out on potential revenue, but in the long run, you’ll have much higher success rates than others in your industry if you can deliver the results.
Way too many times people focus only on making the sale, they never ask the prospect or member if they have the resources to execute what they’re learning. If they don’t have the resources (money for inventory in this case), there is little chance they’ll make it.
14:10 – What role did your team play in growing the membership site?
Micah wanted to know how big of a role Adam himself played in getting the membership site off the ground. Adam said that at first, it was just him and his business partner, but that they both had the shared belief they needed to “find people in any particular area who could grab us by the scruff of the neck and pull us up to the next level.”
One example they shared was hiring an events manager/planner. As their events were scaling, they needed someone with true expertise and experience managing a large event (cost $2 million in all).
At first, they were ‘worried’ but the sales came in, they made their money back, and then profited off the backend sales.
As Adam explains it, the bottom line is experts generally never cost you money. Real experts usually only make you money, so never say “they’re too expensive” rather “how can we afford to get them on our team?”
19:00 – How do you run the membership site and stay an expert on what you’re teaching?
Because running such a successful membership site is time-consuming, Adam no longer runs his own Amazon business. He is able to stay up to date with changes and new strategies because he’s working day in and out helping his members with their Amazon businesses.
He also mentioned he has a student community that is built up with tons of success. The system Adam developed was validated by many people who had gone through the content and started making money.
He turns these people into coaches who are selling on Amazon successfully, but at the same time are able to help other students and members in the program.
26:35 – Importance of a business partner who compliments your skillset with a similar vision
Joe, Adam’s business partner, is a huge community guy – an extrovert. Adam explains that he is an introvert himself even though he is on stage and in the ads.
In the same vein, Adam is the guy who will go out into the woods, rub two sticks together, and start a fire. Joe will come along and say ‘wow that’s a great fire, let me turn it into a bush fire.”
What you’ll notice is that many successful business owners have these strong partners that complement their skillset.
The second thing that makes Reliable Education work is the vision. Having a strong vision is vitally important to success. You need to have a BIG vision in place and believe that what you’re doing is impacting people’s lives.
30:00 – The education space is huge and only growing
One point Adam shared was how big the education space is and it’s only going to grow. Demand for people to learn new skills, improve their lives, etc. will only continue to expand.
Not enough people take the education space seriously enough. If you think about all the education happening in the world, the pie is huge and it’s not hard to get a piece for yourself.
Apart from Reliable Education’s Amazon training, Adam has created courses on his real estate successes and how to build and grow a software company.
Information is special since there is a huge profit margin, but more importantly, it’s about helping people and teaching them something. That’s something both Adam and Micah shared is so much more rewarding than the money.
A beautiful example of this is one of Adam’s students named Sam who started the program at 12 and sold his company at 15 for a million dollars.
Your membership site can have the same effect and change on people’s lives.
34:00 – What advice would you give to the beginning info marketer?
Adam’s advice is to “Just get started!”
A more in-depth answer though is to make everything as high quality as you possibly can. Spend money if you have it and if you don’t then look up videos on YouTube or find a course that talks about recording content with your phone.
Adam says you will probably suck at first, but after 20-30 videos you’ll start to feel more natural in front of the camera.
People tell Adam all the time that he’s so natural on camera, but he says it did NOT come naturally. He’s recorded over 3,000 videos and that experience has led to his ability to record and create content of that caliber.
37:00 – Adam’s advice to start scaling after finding initial success
Once you have some initial sales and members, Adam recommends you use a service called VideoAsk to get testimonials from your existing members. You can use these video testimonials in your marketing materials, website, share them on social media, and use them in your advertising.
Next, he says either charge more for your course and/or create a backend that allows you to spend more to acquire a member.
Lastly, get mentorship or hire experts who will help you in the areas you’re not skilled at.
40:15: Adam’s advice on exiting a business (selling a membership site)
If you’re ready to sell your membership site, he suggests you look at listing your site on Flippa or Empire Flippers. He also recommends Quiet Light Brokerage for a more VIP experience.
44:35 – Record Every Event and Brand it
Earlier in the week before the recording, Sam, the 15-year-old student who sold his Amazon business for $1 million was all over Australia’s national news. In the background was “Reliable Education” branding from the event recordings.
Adam emphasizes that branding everything you put out is hugely important. Had they not spent the money to correctly brand the live event and videos, they wouldn’t have benefited as much from the national press coverage of one of their student’s successes.
His other piece of advice is to record absolutely everything. Even if you can’t sell it directly, you can use these recordings as bonuses to stack onto an offer. As he explains it, people need to be given a reason to take action. If your offer is just $49/month and that’s always available, there is no incentive to take immediate action.
But if you include all these bonus recordings, framed as 20 Recorded Expert Coaching Sessions, and tell them they’ll only get these bonuses if they purchase in the next XX days. That gives them a reason to act.
If you have enough content, you can simply cycle through different content, mix and match, etc. You’ll have unlimited, compelling, limited-time offers that don’t require you to discount your main product.
Full Video Transcript
[00:00:00] Micah Mitchell: Hey, everybody, Micah with Memberium here, and we have the very, very special privilege of having Adam Hudson from reliable education. They’re an Australian based online course provider. Adam, thank you for joining us!
[00:00:16] Adam Hudson: Micah. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having us on your show.
[00:00:21] Micah Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah.
I’m excited to get into this cause we’ve talked briefly and everything you said was so intriguing. So I just want to make sure. You know, everybody listening, uh, gets the value of it as well. So I’m going to ask some questions, some for me, some for them. Um, so why don’t you start off by just giving us a brief intro of kind of who you serve and what you do for them a little bit, and then we’ll go to.
[00:00:44] Adam Hudson: Yeah. So we were based in Australia, as you can probably tell by the accent. Um, and we, uh, specifically started in the Amazon education niche. So it’s mostly, um, moms and dads who are looking for a side hustle. Uh, average age of a community is about 43, 44 married two kids. Um, so we started in 2015 and we also have some extension programs off the main online course as well now, but it’s mainly Amazon sellers. We have a software – education program and we also have a, um, a real estate education program as well, commercial real estate. But our primary one is Amazon.
[00:01:20] Micah Mitchell: Gotcha. And you guys have gotten pretty big for only six years. Um, you have clients, I assume. I know it’s Amazon, so it’s… they’re selling all over the world or where most of your clients?
[00:01:32] Adam Hudson: Yeah. So we have, uh, clients in, uh, 45 countries globally. I can actually show it in a minute. I’m in the back end, but we have about 45, uh, countries, uh, predominantly Australia and New Zealand, because that’s where we started. Um, 20% of our clients are outside of Australia and New Zealand.
Um, and it’s a really active community. We, we sell a high end course there. Our program sells for $3000 US. We have nearly 15,000 clients who’ve bought that program in five or six coming up to six years. Um, and, uh, yeah, they’re from, from all over the world. And, uh, yeah, so we serve people everywhere.
[00:02:09] Micah Mitchell: Cool. So what I’m curious about right at the beginning, thinking about that big courses, did you start with the big course or did you start with other products to get.
[00:02:18] Adam Hudson: No, we started the course originally was 2000 US dollars. Um, and then as we grew the program and as our clients became more successful, which has been one of the big underpinning things, we’ve been sort of tethered to a juggernaut in Amazon and our students do get success. Um, we own a software company which plugs into their actual seller accounts.
So we know their actual results. And as a community they’ve done about one and a half billion dollars in sales on Amazon. In that time, um, just this week we had, uh, one of our students, 15 years old, get bought out for a million dollars at the age of 15, he became a millionaire so those kinds, and it was on national news here in Australia.
Those kinds of successes really helped with the marketing of the program. Uh, it actually works what we, what we’re doing, uh, largely because we’re tethered to, you know, the success of Amazon as well.
[00:03:10] Micah Mitchell: Yeah. I love that. My mentor told me a long time ago, he’s like, you’re doing kind of a sucker fish strategy.
And I said, well, what do you mean? He said, well, the sucker fish kind of lives on the bottom of a bigger fish and you know, so
[00:03:23] Adam Hudson: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:03:24] Micah Mitchell: Yeah.
It’s and it’s an amazing strategy. It’s a great place to be. Um, You guys, one thing that you shared with me that I want to point out, you mentioned your clients success, is you guys do a cool awards program for your clients. So when you talk about how you know their metrics, you actually celebrate their metrics, right?
[00:03:44] Adam Hudson: Yeah. A huge part of our success has been our community. And from day one, we realized that so, our mascot as a company is the rhino. And we, we didn’t realize when we first came up with the idea of putting a rhino into the logo, how it would play out over time.
But, um, the rhino, we chose it because entrepreneurship is hard. You need to be persistent. You need to be strong, especially at the beginning. You need to have short spurts of aggressive energy to get stuff done. And it sort of really aligned with our values. Quiet, peaceful animal. That’s very rare. Um, very strong.
Um, uh, so we tied that into our awards. And so we started off with when they made their first thousand dollars, uh, in sales, we had an award, then they get to $10,000 a month and they get to $25,000 a month, 50,000 us dollars a month and a hundred thousand. And then when they do over a million dollars for the year, They become what we call it, white rhino.
So a hundred thousand dollars a month award is our rhino and our white rhinos. When they’re doing over a million dollars a year, which means pretty much a hundred grand a month every month. Uh, we started these awards with our very first summit and our very first one, was only 400 students. May not have even been that might’ve been 300 students.
We had some little trophies made and we didn’t realize the profound impact of recognition on adults. As adults, we don’t get recognized for anything. So when, and the other thing is when, when people come to these events and they see Joe average sitting next to them, stand up on stage and get an award for doing $10,000 a month in sales.
I was like, oh my goodness, that guy who I was just talking to has achieved that that’s not just like me being the sort of face of the program. That’s, that’s achieved big things in what we do. It’s all these people in the audience. And, uh, as a result of that, it really became a. Uh, a goal for people as adults.
And also when people come to the events, we give them a pin when they win it and they wear the pin or any of the pins they’ve run. And it becomes a real status for them as well as the wristband to the event so that when they turn up, because each year we have an annual summit, the people who have been around the longest, they were all the wristbands from all the events and all the pins they’ve won.
And it’s, you know, we kind of learned that from eBay’s conferences, years and years, years ago, um, and people just love being able to. Uh, you know, distinguish themselves, but also people love them to be distinguished so they can go and talk to them and learn from them and, and so on. So, um, I think it’s something that everybody should do is recognize their students for accomplishments at whatever level.
Um, so I think, I think it’s super important.
[00:06:19] Micah Mitchell: It’s amazing that you’re, like I said, tapping into that, like adults desire for recognition. And it’s anyways. It’s it’s so cool. I love it. I’m sure. We’ll get a little bit more into that. Can, can I ask that you show your site a little bit?
[00:06:33] Adam Hudson: Um, yeah. So I’ll just share the screen with you.
Um, So, uh, okay. Now I warned you guys in advance that, uh, I’m not really the tech guy these days. So we have staff all over the world. Now, can you see that?
[00:06:50] Micah Mitchell: Yes.
I see it an awesome black hole. Now, there we go. Now I see your website. Yeah.
[00:06:54] Adam Hudson: So this is our website, just the front end public facing website. And that’s been our mission from day one, the world’s best Amazon training.
We have a big head office here on the gold coast in Australia. We have studios and whatnot, and on the wall of the studios and 10 foot letters that says the world’s best Amazon training, that’s always been our mission from day one. You can see photo here of one of our most recent student events and, um, there’s some of our smaller workshops from people all over the world.
We’ve done stuff like taking them on boats, on Sydney Harbor, and we do all kinds of cool stuff with our clients. And what you’ll notice here is lots and lots of branding. So in all of our awards ceremonies here, we’ve got all our events are well-branded, everything’s branded to our. Uh, you know, to our branding and whatnot.
Um, so that’s the front end and you can sort of come in here, you can see over the years we’ve, um, you know, uh, gotten a bunch of press and, um, different things that we’ve done. I was shared stage with Tony Robbins and all these different people, which has been really cool. Um, so that’s the front end of the website.
What I thought would, might be. Uh, more interesting is having a look in the backend here, um, for your users. If, if you’d like to, and this is another plugin we use, but you can just see here. This is, uh, logins to our program between September 15th and October, uh, 37,000 logins to our course. Uh, we’ll talk about that later if you want to, but, but this basically shows where people are logging into the program from.
Uh, around the world in the last 30 days, um, which is kind of really fun. I love looking at this because it reminds you of how awesome it is to be an online course creator in today’s world. So, um, so where did you want to go with this? Did you want to have a look in the back end to here and have a walk around this as, as it applies to your, your community?
[00:08:38] Micah Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. I love seeing all that. First of all, and we’ll have to talk more about the SecuraCourse thing, but, um, maybe go to your membership levels and explain. You know, why didn’t you have these different levels and how do they.
[00:08:51] Adam Hudson: Yeah. So yeah, this is really cool by the way, you’ve sorta got it here. You know, the steps here of, you know, 25 users and you set some goals for us, which we love, as I said, we’re on our way to this goal now, which I think we’re at about 15,000.
So if we go over to memberships, um, We have, uh, these are all the different courses that we sell, but our principle one is called zero to one, which is our helping people go from making no money on Amazon to making their first dollar on Amazon. And if you click over, so to log into it, our users just go to our main website, of course, and they come up here and they go log in and then once they get past the security they get in here.
So, um, and depending on what program they’ve purchased, um, May you logged in. So it’s got all of their enrolled in everything. We’ve got a young entrepreneurs program, we’ve got a Southwest school for people that want to learn to develop software. And we’ve got our commercial property program. All of these would say, available for purchase if they’re not purchased, but, and the ones that they are enrolled in, like for example, our main Amazon course, they can go through and this is what it looks like when they get there.
So, um, you can see there’s an intro. Then we’ve got the modules laid out here, which I believe is a plugin to do this sort of grid layout. And then you go through the lessons. Um, and one thing you’ll notice is it’s all beautifully shot, um, professionally produced and, and so on. Um, and you know, so, so is that’s sort of the way it works.
And then if you click into a, um, any of the, um, the lessons, you can say the lessons there, we’ve had them all transcribed, there’s a progress bar, video transcription, all that sort of stuff. And then they just work their way through the entire program. It’s about 220 video lessons in that main program.
[00:10:33] Micah Mitchell: So why is your training so good?
Because like, obviously your branding is great. The design, the layout, all this is I think, you know, best in class, but why do you think it’s so effective?
[00:10:46] Adam Hudson: Well, we set very high standards for ourselves. I think I’ll just stop screen sharing for a second. And I come back and, and, uh, talk on this because, you know, I came from, uh, I was in the animation business in hollywood . California when I started selling on Amazon myself. So I wasn’t a course creator. I was in traditional business. We used to make animated videos for MasterCard, cannon Volvo. Some of the biggest companies in the world. I sold the company in 2015 and like everybody, I was buying online courses to learn different things. But what I was consistently disappointed with was the huge gap between the marketing of online courses and the actual experience of owning them. So, you know, the guys and girls out there spend all this money on slick videos for Facebook, and it’s like you’re a prospect now.
And then big difference when you become a customer and the experience level dropped through the floor because they just don’t care. They’re just like they shoot on a selfie stick with their phone. And I said to my business partner, Joe, at the start, you know, I want to create a course on how to sell on Amazon, but it’s a very snaky business, like how to make money online is one of the snakiest sleaziest businesses in the world.
And I said, I just want to develop a reputation for. Being honest, um, and producing a product that when people buy it behind the paywall is as good or better than what’s in front of the paywall. And so that required some investment and some vision. And I always say to people, there’s three things you need in business.
You need vision, you need standards and to recruit great people, but it’s up to the CEO and the founders to set the vision for what you’re trying to achieve. And so we put up in 10 foot letters on the wall. World’s best Amazon training. That doesn’t just mean the way it looks, but it’s the content. It’s the results that are being produced.
It’s the recognition you give your students. It’s like the vibe of the community. And for the first three years, we actually interviewed every single person that bought our course, they give us a couple of grand for the course. And we’d say, the first thing you’d have to do is do an interview. And it was that we paid contractors in the US I think it was a hundred dollars a call that we budgeted out of that $2,000 to interview each one and find out who they were, what their expectations were, that they had enough money to actually buy inventory.
And if they didn’t, we refunded them and. Or if they just wait, we sorta had a no Dick policy. If you were not a good person, we were just like, here’s your money back? And we gave away $2 million with refunds in the first two years of the business. Um, proactively and sorry in the first three years. Can we go back $2 million of revenue.
Um, but as a result of that, we had a community that was like able to execute what we were teaching. And so now we don’t do it. Now we do it in a different way, but we had really, really, really high standards and, um, and over time that has just borne out really, really well for us. And, uh, we’re, full-time videographer now and we’ve invested, you know, a hundred thousand dollars into our studio.
Just setting up two soundstages proper lighting. But that’s all come from cashflow from the business, but we just had this vision from the start that we wanted to have a really high standard.
[00:14:00] Micah Mitchell: That’s amazing. Um, really, really cool. So for you, you know, knowing that you have this high standard, you talk about bringing in the right people, how much of it was you versus how much, you know, did you bring in team members and they had ideas, you hadn’t thought of.
[00:14:15] Adam Hudson: In the beginning, it was just Joe and I, and like most of people, we started off with videos on a selfie stick, you know, that’s where we began. But very quickly we start and we were doing the best we could at that point. And as soon as we started generating sales, we started hiring. And one thing we’ve been really good at, and Joe, my business partner is really the one that drives that he says, we need to find people that can grab us by the Scruff of the neck, in any particular area and pull us up to the next level. So with our events, we ran three events ourselves, and we started off with 300 people. Then it was 500, then it was a thousand. And then we’re like, we’re not an event management company. We don’t know how to do this.
So we hired the best events management company we could find in Sydney and the fees for them to run the event was 300 grand. The event was $2 million. The next one we put on our fourth one was $2 million budget. And at the time we were like freaking out, but we’ve sold the tickets. We sold enough tickets just to cover the $2 million event. And then we sold other products off the back end, which turned into much more.
But, but every time we’ve hired an expert, um, we’ve always said, well, how does how do we get this money back? Um, and experts generally never cost you money. They will always make you money if you’ve really dealing with an expert. So we’ve sort of never said, they’re too expensive. We said, how can we afford them?
And we just put our tickets for our event to six or $700 or something. We sell 2000, there was 1.4 million upfront at the gate. And then we had some sponsorship and dah, dah, dah, we got very close to the $2 million budget before we put the event on, but that’s sort of been our mindset and we hired, like was we hired the best ad agencies.
We hired the best, all these guys and they, and they always pay for themselves if you, if you priced your thing right. And I think a lot of times people don’t price their stuff, right? Even like we don’t play at the, you can buy an Amazon course for 25 bucks on you to me, or you can come and learn from us for three grand.
Totally different experience.
[00:16:13] Micah Mitchell: It’s interesting that your background wasn’t necessarily in this, but it seems like you came in and made a lot of the right choices. How much of that would you say just came from your experience beforehand versus was there some way that you learned? I know you said you took a lot of courses, but where would you say most of this knowledge came from?
[00:16:33] Adam Hudson: Well, I was a business guy, you know, I’m 47 years old today. I didn’t start Reliable Education till I was 41. So. Uh, I think having been on the planet as an adult for 20 years, by that time, um, it had given me enough life experience to know the difference between good and bad, um, as it relates to marketing and sales and just general quality and expectations.
I would want, so I think 20, and I’ve been in business since I was 20. I have not had a job since I was 20 years old. I used to work in a picture framing store at a retail outlet. So I came, just had high school education and I started entrepreneurship when I was 20. So I’ve been in business for 21 years.
By the time I started selling online courses and the online course itself, the reason for starting it was that I was already very successful at selling on Amazon. So. Um, it wasn’t like I thought, oh, selling an Amazon course would be a great money maker. It was, I’ve got this really successful Amazon business, which I’d started.
Part-time around my animation company in Hollywood. I started selling whiskey glasses and wine products, and I grew it into a seven figure business in 33 countries with Amazon. And, um, It was built on a real genuine success story. And then when I started teaching it, it was all based actually on my own real life experience.
So the qualitative aspect of the information was real. And then I think the second layer was. We want to build a course. We were very, very aware of how disappointing a lot of our make money online industry has been. I don’t know whether that’s across other online courses. I think there’s probably other sectors that are much more aware of the customer experience, but in the make money online space, there’s just so little effort and the standard just drops because they’re amazing marketers and quite often, really bad at the delivery of the content. So I think that’s the, to put together.
[00:18:31] Micah Mitchell: That makes sense. I, it makes me think that a lot of the people who I’ve come across who’ve used our product are definitely experts in their field. So like you’re saying you were, you were successful on Amazon, but when they came in to make the product there, their expectation was maybe like, oh, I’m . Just going to put my knowledge into videos and sell that and get rich versus your expectation of I’m going to try to raise the bar, you know, do as, as good as I can with the product quality. Um, a question I have for you is having done it for a minute. Um, how, I guess what I’ve seen is some people will be an expert in their field and then they’ll become an information marketer and that will distract them from their field.
So where is your Amazon data coming from now? I assume you’re still running that business, but by how do you stay fresh on the Amazons stuff and be this expert, you know, information business.
[00:19:23] Adam Hudson: Yeah, well today our business is quite different. We have, um, I think we have about 20 something staff, um, full-time employees, and then we have be more including salespeople’s probably 30.
Um, and then we have, um, and then we have. Um, a coaching team. So these are all people who’ve come through our program are students that are now doing anywhere from 25, 30,000 a month on Amazon up to $200,000 a month. We have a panel of eight coaches who coach. We have a high-end coaching program as well.
Um, and we have over a thousand students in that program that paid $20,000 a year to be in the program. And yes, Um, we, and we have a body of students that are, have done, uh, 1.4 billion in sales. On the platform. So now there’s far more successful sellers than may in our student community. So I’ve sort of been very fortunate that we’ve been able to migrate from Adam’s story of being a successful seller to Adam’s system is now validated across a lot of students.
And we’ve got hundreds of them that have won awards and we’ve. Yeah, I’m holding trophies of I’m doing a hundred thousand dollars a month on Amazon, you know, and they’ve taken photos and put it on their social media and in our walls at our factory, our, we call it our factory. It’s a factory that we converted to a studio.
We’ve got all these awards put up that our students have won. We learned this from Russell Brunson. Um, And so it’s not just about me now. So it has grown to the point where I’ve now sold my Amazon business. And, um, I just teach now because I just don’t have the bandwidth to run the Amazon businesses and, uh, teach.
And so I make no secret of that. Uh, now. Uh, that that has been successful. And I just stay across it by talking to students. We’re always running events. So, you know, like we’ve got some tomorrow and Sunday we have 50 students each day coming into the studio for a small workshop and then we, um, train them for a day.
So that’s part of what they get. They . Get to come into our head office. We train them for full day in-person. Um, if they’re in Australia and New Zealand, so
[00:21:37] Micah Mitchell: Cool. Gotcha. And it sounds like you’re doing more than just learning from your clients. You’re saying there’s like peer-to-peer coaching going on.
You’re a very successful clients are coaches.
[00:21:48] Adam Hudson: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, people say out to pull me away from my day-to-day. Well, you know, I was happy to be pulled away from the day to day because our business has grown so much now. Um, we started off five years ago with a cell phone and a selfie stick and, um, you know, we’ve done, I think 60 or $70 million in sales in five years, starting from zero.
So, um, you know, we were, you know, very fortunate , because we were doing the right thing at the right time with the right intent and offering value. And so what I think a lot of people watching this program who own online courses may be underestimating is that they often think they need to be the cheapest course around.
People have an appetite for being coached. And so we just watched what the best were doing. People like Russell Brunson and these guys that have built really great communities and sold a lot of information. And they have these Ascension models where you sort of start like we’ve, we’ve, we’ve learned. And we use Memberium actually for this now, um, you know, we start off with, you know, we meet somebody on the internet and we say, How would you like to learn, sell on Amazon, come to this webinar kind of thing.
And then we have they, if they say yes and opt in for the webinar, we then offer them a couple of little offers. Hey, $47. Would you like this? Right now? It’s worth 197, but you can get it for 47. If they say yes or no, then we offer them something else. And we have a little mini versions of our course that we try to sell them right there at the opt-in.
So we liquidate, I think right now we’re liquidating about 30% of our traffic costs. Right there at the gate and we spend, I don’t know, 300 grand a month on. So $60,000 is offset right there at the click. Um, but anyway, the point is we, we bump into somebody on the internet, which is the biggest bar in the world.
If you like, say hello, how are you doing? And try to get them to go on a date with us at some level, starting off with a webinar, and then maybe invite them to a second dinner, which is a $47 thing or whatever. Um, but, but then they come through this funnel and then they end up in a live event with. And then we say, Hey, listen, you know, like you can do this two ways.
You can study at home on your own and do our online course and everything that you need is there. And all of our students collectively have done this. But what’s interesting is that, um, all of our rhino award winners, about 5% of our community. Um, who who buy a $3,000 program about 5% sign up for our $20,000 program for one-on-one coaching.
So they can book a call one-on-one like just like what we’re doing right now for up to 45 minutes with a coach anytime throughout the year. And, um, they pay 20 grand for it. And. And about 5% of people who buy our online course pay for that. Now of the people who win the a hundred thousand dollar award, which is what everybody wants the rhino or the a hundred thousand dollars a month, 73% of people who win that come from the 5% who are getting coaching.
And so when you look at that in context and you go, wow. The power of one-on-one coaching is undeniable. And if you’re not offering it, I don’t know. It might not apply to everybody watching this, but they’re certainly in our space. Selling on Amazon is hard. There’s a lot of complexity because you sit there at home.
Wherever you might live. You’ve got to source a product probably from China, where you’ve never been from people that don’t speak English, uh, production, never going to see, and they’re going to ship it from China to an Amazon fulfillment center. They’re going to sell it in another country. This is the reality for all our Australian clients.
They’re going to send it to America, to fulfillment center. They’re never going to visit in a box. They’re never going to touch to a customer. They’re never going to meet from a supply that doesn’t even speak their language. I mean, it’s a lot. And so there’s a lot to it. So. If left to the cells and just an online course, they can learn it, but there’s nothing like what we’re doing right now, where I go, Micah, share your screen with me and I’ll show you how to do it.
And if, if you’ve got a significantly higher chance and that the odds are 14.2 times more likely to win an award from us, if you’re getting COVID. That’s the step 14.2 times more likely to win a sales ward and 73% of our rhino award winners, a hundred thousand dollars a month awards an outcome from that 5% of invested, 20 grand to coaching.
So naturally we sell a lot of coaching because people like will look in the scheme of starting a business $20,000. Plus a $3,000 course that’s not unreasonable. Um, and the proof is in the pudding and our coaches are actual, real live Amazon sellers right now who can open their accounts and go, I’m doing 30 grand, 50 grand, a hundred grand, 200 grand a month right now.
So, um, so that’s kind of cool. And then we have some other programs for those people.
[00:26:29] Micah Mitchell: It’s not kind of cool. It’s very cool.
Yeah, I love it. So what would you say, you know, aside from, okay, I’ve got great content and I’m delivering it the best I can. Um, is there anything else that you feel you’re doing that’s kind of unique or special that, that makes it work?
Anything else come to mind?
[00:26:50] Adam Hudson: I think for us, you know, um, Joe, my business partner, he’s the community guy. He loves people. And, um, and, and I do as well, but Joe’s the kind of guy, if there’s a party, he’s the last guy to leave. He’ll talk the leg off the chair before he’s gone. So he loves people. I’m actually much more introverted, although I’m on the stage and under the spotlight and the guy on all the ads, um, So we have this really great partnership.
And I think having a great business partner is really, really helpful in anything. I don’t know what it’s like with Memberium, but I know with, with us and I own multiple businesses, I don’t own any of them on my own. So having somebody who’s shares your vision and who compliments your skillset. So Joe is I’m the guy that will go out into the forest and rub two sticks together and try and start a fire.
I’m that real. Died in the wool entrepreneur. Whereas Joe is the kind of guy that will say, wow, that’s a cool fire. Let me turn that into a bushfire. And if you look at like Russell Brunson, he’s got Dave Woodward as his right-hand man. He’s now the CEO, Russell’s the guys on the camera. Dave’s the guy that builds the building into a billion dollar business.
And you’ll find that often partnerships are really important and yeah. Um, secondly, is having a real vision for what you’re doing. Um, I, I have a friend who teaches people to sing, uh, Per Bristow. You can look him up and, uh, you know, per yeah, perfect, good mate. And, you know, he’d just teach people to sing and you’d never think that he’s built this empire that he’s built on.
How to teach people to have confidence and seeing you did a world tour last year or the year before, just before COVID we went around the world, filling rooms, like thousands of people coming, um, teaching that I have another friend who just sold his company to Microsoft, Steve Steven Cox, who started take lessons.com, teaching people to play musical instruments online is where he started.
And now he’s going into math and everything else. Microsoft just acquired them a month ago. Most people don’t have a big enough vision. I think in the education space, education is such a Big space. And that’s why I love what you’re doing with Memberium You sort of link, um, people have a aspiration of educating people with the actual granular engine, you know, the CRM that you need to really scale it.
And without you in between us and Keap we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. And we have a lot of. Uh, we have a guy who pretty much does our in-house data analytics. So we know where people are in our database via tagging, and we take them on unique journeys and we’re able to monetize because we use keep, but we also are able to monetize because we’ve got members there sorta get all out and structuring our content.
So, um, the tools are there today. You just got to have the vision for what you’re doing and, um, There’s a lot of money out there if ya get it right. And, um, and, and you’re in the right thing at the right time, but you know, who would have thought Per could build what he built, but he did.
[00:29:45] Micah Mitchell: Um, I’m happy to hear he’s doing so well.
It’s been a minute, but, uh, it’s the same thing. Like the people who do a good job and stick with it, doing a good job, eventually they’re just killing it. I love it. You know what I mean? I’m happy for him. Um, so you mentioned one thing and I appreciate you mentioning Memberium and that it is our goal to help experts share knowledge.
Uh, I think though what you said about people not taking the education space seriously enough is, is so huge. I, um, Robert Kiyosaki, I love his books. And one of the things he mentioned in there at one point was how education is one of, if not the biggest industry in the world. If you really think of what education is like all the primary education, all college, all courses, all continuing education.
It’s, it’s ridiculous, you know, um, Yeah, you guys reliable. Do you do other stuff besides Amazon? You mentioned a few courses, but I don’t know if those were applied to Amazon or was that totally?
[00:30:39] Adam Hudson: No, no, we do. I own quite a bit of real estate as well. So I’m a commercial property owner, so I, I own factories and warehouses and, you know, churches and buildings that churches rent from me and gymnasiums and all that sort of stuff.
So, um, I, I created a course around how I built my real estate empire, uh, and I also stopped. To SAS companies. Um, so I started a course on how to build a SAS product. One just recently got VC funding. Um, it’s doing really well with bootstrap for five years, and then we got funding and now it’s growing to a whole nother level.
Um, so we did a product on that as well. Um, So, yeah, we, we, we sort of, we, we’ve only released courses on what we know about, um, but it is an amazing business market, you know, and I, and I, I just think, you know, I’ve been in all kinds of businesses, I’ve owned everything, like everything from a hairdressing salon to an animation company in Hollywood to a flight simulator, company’s down 747 flight simulators that I rented out.
Like the most random stuff you can imagine, but information, especially. From a business metrics, point of view, like there’s no profit margin, like the profit margin of a course. Um, but that’s only part of it. The other part of it is there’s something really special and beautiful about teaching people and seeing them learn something and the lights come on.
And because I think. Humans love to learn. And if you teach them something and then you see that something like, you know, watching Sam who’s 15, he went to our first program when he was 12, started at Amazon business at 13, two years later, he sold it for a million dollars. The impact that that’s having on this kids alive, he’s buying a Tesla at 15 for when he gets his driver’s license is just insane.
And it was an all cash deal. It’s real. And seeing people’s lives actually changed. Um, And it’s a lot of fun. Like I got in, you know, it’s to make money and have fun and have. Uh, love you for it is kind of like, is there anything better than that? You know, um, I got to speak on stage with Tony Robbins, which was like one of those moments.
Like they invited when they came to Brisbane, the promoters around me said, Hey, listen, we heard you do this amazing Amazon course. Can you come and talk to our audience? And you can sell your course. And they gave you a one hour on stage and we did a million and something dollars in sales in one hour on a stage.
And I had a blast doing it. So like, it’s, it’s an amazing business if you get it right. And the reason we did so well was chips with the right thing at the right time. But the audience, especially in Australia are very highly tuned bullshit detectors, and they can tell when you’re really there for the right reasons and we really want to help people.
And so that’s sort of the thing that underpins lot of the success we’ve had.
[00:33:22] Micah Mitchell: Yeah. It’s amazing when you come at it, like you’re saying the right way with the right intention, how good it can be. Um, and I’ve seen that so many times and, and the people’s lives change, you know, their family life change, their work, their lifestyle, I should say, just totally changes.
Right. Um, usually in the sense, like sure, maybe more money, right. More time and choices and freedom to move about and learn new things. Uh, it’s it’s such a cool business. So, um, I’m sure you, you’re good at this in a bunch of contexts, you know, coaching entrepreneurs and stuff for the beginning information marketer, who is an expert and does, does want to get, you know, a product created at high quality.
Um, what advice would you give them initially? Like how. Kind of your mindset advice?
[00:34:14] Adam Hudson: The first thing I would say is just published to start with, you’re going to suck when you begin, like I have a vision aspire to high-quality, but don’t let that stop you like, um, you, these days you can get these cameras.
Like these are amazing cameras just invest when I say high quality. get a mic, you know, don’t be standing where the wind blowing on the microphone, you know, like actually the vision of the sound is good. That’s the most, most of the sun shining on the face. The background’s not a dumpster and, and you’ve got good sound.
And if you do that and set it on tripod and start to publish, just do a basic. Course on how to shoot a video like this there’s little courses you can do on YouTube or search them out, pay somebody how to create great videos. And then start because I look back five years ago and I looked at the very first video I did where I was standing against the wall in my apartment with my iPhone there.
And I looked awkward. I didn’t know what I was going to say. It’s terrifying when you’ve got like this thing looking at you, but the more you do it, you just got to keep going. And then after like 20, 30 videos, um, you know, you, you, um, I was going to just look something up quickly. After 2030 videos, you start to go, oh, I’m starting to feel more natural.
Now we’ve been in business six years. I was in my Vimeo account. The other day we’ve done. I think it was 3,800 videos in. Five years now, you know, that means we’re publishing people go, oh, you’re such a natural Adam on camera. And I’m like, dude, I’ve done 4,000 videos. Like, um, in the beginning for the first year, we were probably doing two videos a day for YouTube ads and Facebook ads or three videos a day shooting, editing, getting up onto the platforms, you know, So the only way you become an expert at it is through doing it.
So just start, it’s better to be well done and well said, you know, Actually publish and, and then model people that are doing a great job, um, if your heart’s in the right place and if your contents good and people want what you have. And, and, and those are the three things. Um, sometimes people have great content.
That’s nobody wants, it’s just not marketable, you know, and that’s not a personal thing. It’s just, you’re selling the wrong thing. And. In entrepreneurship, it’s, it’s always about product market fit. And so if you’ve, if you’ve, if your heart’s right, your content is good and people want what you sell and the price is fair, you’re gonna succeed.
And then the rest is icing after that.
[00:36:42] Micah Mitchell: I love it. Thank you. So now, So let’s say somebody has built something good and they’ve got a, they’ve got some momentum, but they want to take it to the next level. Meaning like they’ve got a course, they’ve got people buying it and saying, oh, this worked for me. Like, let’s even say they’re getting testimonials.
What’s the next step to expand that?
[00:37:02] Adam Hudson: Oh yeah. And just on testimonials, uh, you know, we use a thing called ask a video, ask. That’s something that everybody should be using if they’re not at the Typeform product, I believe. And just going out to your community. And so. You know, use me just go to video ass, check it out.
It’s awesome. Because you get video audio, you can transcribe it, you can get still images off it, so you can punch those testimonials out in all formats, across all channels. It’s really cool. If you’re in that category, my questions would then be about scale. And how do you scale the thing? Well, That comes down to money to, to, to get a program out globally.
Like when I said before, we spend 300 grand a month on traffic, right. Mo a lot of people listening would go, oh my God. Like I can’t do that. That’s ridiculous. Well, the reason we’re able to do that is because we have a $3,000 product and we have a $20,000 backend. Um, you might go, well, can my, can my product sell three grand.
If it can’t then is there a backend, can, you know, if we can sell it for a thousand dollars, I think it costs us about $1,200 to acquire a customer through traffic. So we have to sell the course at $1,200 or more just to get our money back on the traffic, um, at that price. At, you know, at, at $3,000 price point.
Um, so it comes down to metrics. How much can you charge for the front end of your course? Uh, how much could you charge for a backend product and how quickly can, can you liquidate that cost? How quickly can you bring forward that back end event? To get the second tranche of money where your profit might lie.
So for us, we make some profit on the front end and we make a lot more of the profit on the back end. Um, uh, so that’s our sort of business model. So it’s really getting down into the accountant within you and talking to people. I went to a, an event with Yanik silver. Uh, when I was about one year into this journey and I went to this thing called camp Maverick in upstate New York, I flew all the way there.
And I went there and they said at one point he a piece of paper write on here, what you want to learn, fold it into an airplane and throw it into the room. And everybody had to do that. It was like 200 entrepreneurs in the room. And I said, I want to figure out how to get to eight figures selling my course, like I’d never sold $10 million worth of.
Uh, of course. So I said, who in here, and it’s only picked up the airplane and they didn’t know how to do it, but then you two people who had already done it and my name and my, uh, contact details there. And it was a great exercise in the seminar because everybody, I thought it was just no way in this.
This is planes going to come back to me. A couple of guys said, here’s how you do it, you know? And they showed me how to scale that the metrics of it, and then put me in touch with some other people and my mind. Yeah. Boom. And then, you know, we went to eight figures in a year, not in total. We would, you know, we went to eight figures annually at margins, you know, 50.
So, um, yeah, so it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s about looking at the metrics, talking to entrepreneurs that have done it before you start off study guys like Russell Brunson, you go to Russell’s funnel, hacking, live events, you know, um, and watch them make millions of dollars right in front of your eyes and go, what can I learn from this?
[00:40:11] Micah Mitchell: That’s fantastic advice. So let’s say at the end of a journey, somebody’s kind of built up and scaled and. And made a business worth selling. Um, how do you approach an exit? Cause it sounds like you’ve sold a few and coached a lot of people have sold things. So how do you approach that maybe with a membership?
[00:40:29] Adam Hudson: Uh, w these days, oh, it’s such a good time to sell membership sites. Oh my goodness. I’m so excited about that. So go, if you’re not already subscribed, go to flippa.com or empire builders.com start consuming their content, uh, or go to like the, we, we, um, have a, a firm called quiet light brokerage. So quiet light specialize in selling online businesses.
So flip out and empire builders are kind of like platforms where you can advertise your business. And then now have a layer there where they’ll actually have a broker help you and put it together. Or if you want to sort of more bespoke experience, talk to the guys at quiet light, because they’re just really good guys.
I know the founders really well. They’ve got a, depending on how big you are, they can sell anything from. Sort of a hundred thousand dollar business up to a 50 or a hundred million dollar business, but they’re just good people. Um, and you just talk to brokers or go to empire flippers or flipper.com, F L I P P a M and just subscribe.
And you’ll see every week in your inbox, people selling membership sites, online businesses and the market right now is just so red, hot, I think last month our clients sold. I think five or $6 million worth of Amazon FBA businesses that our clients owned that were sold just last month. Um, and so just that learning another great book to read is built to sell.
I think it’s John Warrillow. He has a fantastic podcast built to sell amazing. Every entrepreneur should consume that. And, um, There’s another one, another podcast called I think it’s called beyond eight figures, which I listened to. I was actually interviewed on there in San Diego. Those guys do an amazing job as well.
[00:42:13] Micah Mitchell: So cool. I, I feel like I am not prepared with enough questions cause we have such answers. Um, this is amazing. So I know we’re getting close to the end. Um, what about your membership site? Have we not. And gotten into, um, that you wanted to share.
[00:42:30] Adam Hudson: Uh I’ll look, I I’m from the technical point of view. I’m not the tech guy, but I, but I think, um, you know, uh, probably not a lot.
I mean, you can see the layout of the program there. Um, I was gonna mention secure costs too, which has been something that’s one of my projects. I actually don’t own secure course. I mentoring three of our students from software school. Um, I said, Hey, listen, let’s create a test project. With a real need.
And so I’m mentoring three young entrepreneurs on how to build it. And I think they’ve done a great job and we use their software in our WordPress sites. And basically what it does is, um, when people go to the login of our thing, it checks the parameters of that device and it limits access to our course on a device basis.
So we tell our students. You can only have three devices access to the program. And then what the software does is it issues. What we call a secure part lasts like a cookie onto that device. It records the metrics of the device and if they go beyond three, uh, it says, Hey, contact the course owner, you’ll be on two or three device limits.
Stops access to the gate rather than giving them a username and password, which they can share. And, um, what, that was what I showed you just quickly before on the screenshot. And what’s really cool is it shows us everywhere where people have logged in 34, 30 1000 logins this month. And it also shows that it was for.
Breaches where people tried to share the logins beyond the three devices. So it sort of controls their intellectual property and people go, oh, I can’t just sort of ring five mates and split the cost of this education. They go value. These guys actually limit the course. If you guys want it, I’m going to be using the three devices with myself, my wife and my kid.
You’re going to have to buy it yourself rather than. Maybe doing a Netflix special and new. So, um, I’m really excited about what they’re doing there. And I think it’s a cool thing for a lot of men, barium users. Um, but other than that, I think, um, look the course. Uh, look, it’s, we’ve evolved. You know, we started fairly simple.
The original program was only 40 videos today. It’s 210. Um, we don’t make our lessons too long. The other thing is we record everything. So every event you do, you must record it and secondarily must brand it. And so what I mean by that, Earlier this week. I’ve got it here. Actually, we were, as I said, with Sam, he was on national news and, um, that was pretty exciting for everybody.
Um, I’ll just show you this real quick on the camera. I won’t play the sound, but you can see sort of, uh, This is the news article. I’ll just tilt the screen a little bit, cause I’m getting glare. Uh, so this is the kid, but you can see there that’s me on stage. See that branding in the background. So there’s all this all the way through that news article, there was, um, there was footage of Sam onstage in front of all our students and because of it invested in branding, reliable education was all over national news.
On the country on the weekend that they were on channel 10 channel night or the big channels here. Um, and so we’ve always invested in photography. Every time we do an event, we capture it and we document it because we can then use the content in, um, like often with bonuses. So if you buy our course, if you take action, this is a big, big, big, big, big thing for everybody watching.
This are going to cause. If you’re not doing enough sales, are you giving people a reason to act now? That is the biggest mistake. I see. Co-signers I do a webinar. It’s amazing. And people sit there twiddling their thumbs. They go, I’ve got no sales. You need to give them a massive, compelling reason to buy right now or before a, a hard deadline.
So if we do a live webinar, we’ll say the office open on Wednesday night and Sunday it closes. And here’s all the stuff we’re going to give you. If you get started before Sunday. And a lot of that stuff is. Every single thing that we do, I w you know, not every city, some stuff we were doing just the behind, like for our private clients, we can’t release that content, but like, for example, I might get this recording.
Uh, if, with your permission to say, I’ll give you a one hour recording where that, where I was interviewed by. Micah. And you’re going to get all these insights. Now, this is probably not a prime example because the content is not really suited to Amazon. But if I get interviewed by a podcast and I do all the time, I might pack up 20 podcasts and say, I’ll give you the recordings to 20 hours of, of training.
And, you know, and I bundle all that stuff into the bonus so that there’s a reason to act now. And that’s, that’s a big, the biggest thing that I see info market is missing all the time or not being objective about how compelling. They offer is the offer has to be super compelling, a reason to act. Now we do it in our SaaS businesses.
Um, we give them a super compelling reason to take action with an expiring offer and on the landing page account at a time ago down the human brain goes, oh my God, I don’t want to miss out on him and say, I don’t wanna miss out. I’ve got to join Memberium and because Andrew is going to, sorry, Micah is going to give you.
All this stuff, which might be, you know, this interview, for example, Micah and you should interview 20 of your clients who are crushing it and say, if you get started with Memberium, now I’m going to give you 20 as a coaching with client with course creators that are, that have generated over a hundred million dollars in sales and on, on men using Memberium.
And so that’s just me plus four other guys, and it’s done, but that’s a nice bonus to get, right. So, you know, just really. Extracting the value. And that’s why we’re constantly interviewing students and constantly asking, can we interview you about your Amazon journey? Because that’ll can become bonuses, content that we give away in exchange for you taking action or whatever else, or just put it into the course itself.
[00:48:05] Micah Mitchell: So good and so useful because you’re right. People are typically doing these things. They’re just not maximizing it. They’re not taking advantage of it. You know, maybe not branding it as well as you guys are. Everything has been amazing. Adam, thank you so much for being on with us. Um, can you tell people how to get in touch with you?
[00:48:24] Adam Hudson: Yeah, totally. Just check out our website, um, reliable.education, the full word. Uh, there’s . No.com. It’s just reliable dot education. And then if I have any questions, I can certainly reach out to us via the website. Um, no problem at all, and uh, happy to help
[00:48:42] Micah Mitchell: You are amazing. Thank you so much and have a good day!
[00:48:45] Adam Hudson: Thanks so much.
