How to Choose the Right Online Business Model: Cohort, Evergreen, or Hybrid?

Hey, I am going to talk today about the key

differences between a cohort style business model, an

evergreen model, and and hybrid, which we call the infinite scale

delivery model. And we're gonna talk about like, what, which one

is right for your business? How do you set yourself up for

success? And then, you know, what are the kind of key

differences, the pros and the cons, all the different things

around all three of these different models, and then I'm

gonna share with you why I believe that the infinite scale

model, or the hybrid model, is the best model for you, as

you're trying to grow and scale your online business. Alright,

so let's dive in.

Okay, so each approach has unique benefits and challenges.

And, and so understanding how you're operating or like, the

rules for each one of them are really important. And then you

can look at, what do you like from this one? What do you like

from that one, and create a hybrid model that tends to serve

both your customers as well as you as the creator better as

you're moving forward. So alright, I'm gonna break each

one down individually. Okay, so let's start with a cohort

experience, the cohort experience really involves

enrolling a group of people. So your customers are all coming in

at the same time. So there's a specific start date and a

specific end date. And you are taking them through an

experience together as a group. And and so with a cohort model,

the best part about this approach is that it really gives

you a sense of community and shared experience for your

customers and participants, you're sort of putting them in

an environment where they feel like they have some

accountability from other people, not just you. And so

that is definitely a pro of the cohort launch. So they you're

building a community of people who are going through an

experience together, which tends to help it become more sticky,

because people don't want to let other people down, Aand they

like to see how they fit within kind of a broader community,

it's a focused effort. So you can concentrate like all your

marketing, all your sales to drive towards starting on a

particular date. So it helps you focus, it helps to have that a

little bit of sense of urgency or scarcity in there. And, and

so it's it's just more concentrated in terms of like

instant, it's more of an event, that you're creating some buzz

and excitement around. And there tends to be more engagement

because people are going through it together, right? community

accountability, there's just a different level of energy,

because people are going through the cohort experience together.

So that's the biggest pro and that, from my perspective, is

that there's a start date and an end date. So if you're the type

of person who has a hard time sort of getting started, or you

honestly haven't launched yet, doing a cohort is a great way to

get yourself moving. The other thing is, is it doesn't have to

be completely done and finished before you launch your cohort,

which we call a beta launch. So as you're starting to create an

online business, or create your business, you're creating a test

or a prototype, to test your model to make sure that what

you're teaching how you're showing up how your coaching is

actually going to get people results. A cohort style launch

is a great way to get yourself in the game. Usually our clients

start with a an initial beta launch, which is a cohort. And

then typically, they have two to three more cohorts before they

start moving into another model. Just because you'd need to learn

what's working, what's not working, what people are

resonating to how to get people engaged, and how to help them

get results, before you sort of lock and load it and have it be

something that's more evergreen, or more of an asset that you can

consistently sell. So the cohort model is a great place to start.

It's a great way to learn. And obviously, you know, it's got

some additional benefits in terms of community and whatnot.

The cons though of a cohort launch is that it is time

intensive, right you have to have a lot of planning, a lot of

coordination, a lot of things happening in a short period of

time. And so it's definitely something that takes up more of

your time. It will take more of your time to show up live with a

cohort, although I'm going to give you some tips and tricks on

how to deal with that later on in this episode, but, but it's

definitely more time intensive. then having it be a continuous

launch. And with limited enrollment periods, one of the

biggest challenges that people run into is you get a cash

infusion. And then you don't get another cash infusion until you

launch another cohort. And, and so there's sort of this feast or

famine roller coaster that's happening. And we want to iron

that out, we want to make sure that you're having reoccurring

revenue coming in. And when you're doing a cohort launch,

depending upon how often you're doing it, that definitely plays

into that definitely plays into that part of the, the

experience. And, and so again, like, the ideal for this is to

use it to launch your beta, and then to kind of get your system

functioning consistently to the point where you can start to

sell and deliver consistently.

Alright, so the second way, the second model is the Evergreen

experience, an evergreen experience allows participants

to enroll in sort of the core course, or program or whatever

you got going on coaching program, at any time. Generally,

it's pre recorded and available on demand, meaning people can

jump into at any point in time, there's not a specific start or

end date. And, and so you have that continuous enrollment, you

can scale that, that asset because it's already created. So

you create it once and then you can sell it and deliver it over

and over and over again, right. So that's the benefit of an

evergreen experience. And there's tons of flexibility,

flexibility for you in terms of how you're supporting your

customers, flexibilities for your customers, that they can

access it at any time, right like, at their own pace, or, you

know, just on their own schedule, wherever they are. So

definitely some advantages of that with a cohort, there's

technique, typically, a specific time people are meeting right,

so it's like Thursdays at one o'clock. With an evergreen

launch, they can jump into the content at any point in time,

and watch it at their convenience. So that's

definitely a pro of the Evergreen experience. So the

cons of the evergreen experience are pretty much the opposite of

all of the pros, right? So it's continuous enrollment, which

means that there may not be a sense of urgency for people to

actually take action and join the experience. It's scalable,

which is awesome. But you have to, you have to make sure that

you're scaling the right experience, what tends to happen

for a lot of my creators who love to be involved, they love

to be included in the customer's journey to helping them get to

success, when you have an evergreen launch, a con of this

is that if you aren't helping them and you have that desire,

then you are either going to go and create a bunch of other

things, or you're going to insert yourself at weird times.

And so it's not going to be consistent experience. The other

cons is the initial setup. And again, like the way that we

teach people how to do this, if you're going to do an evergreen

launch is start with a cohort launch, do that in beta and then

move it into an evergreen product that allows you to

handle that setup time. So yes, it's much more. In fact, we

don't recommend that you build it and then try and sell it

right you want to co create it with your perfect customers, and

then move it into an evergreen launch if you're going in that

direction. And so you have to just sort of figure out what

makes the most sense for you in terms of a cohort, an evergreen

experience, or the third option, which is my favorite. And

obviously we've built a business around it, which is the infinite

scale experience or that hybrid experience.

So you're taking the best of the cohort model and the best of the

Evergreen model and squishing them together to make a hybrid

experience, which means that you're taking the system's the

strategies and sort of the growth model of both of them and

being able to deliver an awesome experience while also maximizing

and leveraging the time that you're spending with people. And

so the the great thing about this approach is you can have

people continuously come in, but it's a structured curriculum so

people are coming in their learning in sort of an evergreen

curriculum status, right, like, they're going through the

curriculum that you have set out for them that you've already

created. And then they can jump into a live component to get

their questions answered, to get coaching to get accountability,

and like all the things community at the same time,

while they're going through the experience, so a lot of what are

the biggest challenges of a cohort launch is that you're

continuously teaching over and over and over again, right, so

you show up a specific time you're teaching. And then you're

answering questions, or you're working with people or

workshopping or doing whatever, but you're repeating the same

thing over and over again. So if you do a cohort four times a

year, 12 times a year, you're repeating everything that you're

doing every single time you have a new cohort that comes in, once

you can structure all of the sort of the learning the the

actions that they need to take all of the foundational elements

that go into replacing you showing up live teaching your

thing every single time. What that does is it gives you the

flexibility to to show up and actually solve big problems with

your people or help them remove obstacles or hurdles of having

along the way, help with mindset, how you know, all the

different things that you can help with like that is a really

high level use of your time is to have those those you know,

accountability conversations, or coaching conversations, or q&a

or group experiences or workshops or whatever, it gives

you the freedom to be able to have those because you're not

spending all of your time re teaching. And so in the hybrid

experience, you're doing both you're showing up when you need

to show up. And you're structuring a curated experience

for your people. That helps them like come in where they are, get

what they need, and then get the support along with him. So it's

such a powerful way to build the business because it's offering

flexibility. And, and community at the same time, right. So you

have flexibility over, they can show up whenever you can show up

whenever you're not like spending all of your time in one

on one calls or cohort calls. You're not spending all of your

time building evergreen assets, you're really having that

balanced workload. So it gives you that opportunity to have a

consistent experience, create a consistent experience, and then

deliver it. It offers scalability with a personal

touch, which I really love because you're taking that

evergreen model layering in a personalized approach, that that

allows people to connect, right, like people want connection. And

they want to know that somebody is paying attention you as a

coach or the community or however you structure it, so

that it gives them a really that balanced approach. But it gives

them a holistic view of how they're going to help themselves

get to the transformation that they want to get to. And that is

where it becomes really powerful. And then consistency,

like you're able to build a consistent model that somebody

can jump into, at any point in time, get what they need, follow

the path, get support, and help and then keep moving forward.

And so it provides you with the clarity and confidence to be

able to have your thing in to get to drive people to results.

But it also helps your customers and your clients know exactly

how to get there. The cons of a hybrid launch, that you still

need to have sort of coordination in terms of when

somebody comes in, how are they getting dropped into the right

place. And so one of the things we work with our clients on is

like, here's how you set up their customer journey. And

here's how you set up your personalized customer in

somewhat customized learning path for your, for your people,

depending on where they're coming in. And so when you have

your experience map and you have a way to figure out in an in a

an automated fashion where someone is in what they need to

get to the results, you're able to literally get somebody

results without you having to constantly be with them all the

time. But that coordination like that requires planning that

requires really understanding the journey and the steps to go

from point A to point B which we talked about as your signature

methodology. And then knowing how to get somebody there,

right? Like, where are the hurdles? Are they're gonna run

into along the path? How do you knock those down? Without?

Without them experiencing them? Right? And so looking at that,

and then, and then how, how to make sure that like, if

somebody's coming in at the, you know, by themselves or whatever,

instead of a cohort? How are you engaging them? Right? Like, how

do they? How did they know that they can show up? How do you

communicate with them all the options when you're not doing

that live? So again, that's all solved with technology, once

you've mapped out the entire journey that somebody goes on.

So, again, that's something that we, we help our clients kind of

figure that out.

Okay, so overall, that is definitely like, my favorite

strategy is the hybrid strategy because it gives you a sense of

being involved in helping your customers and having a

consistent experience or asset that you can run people through

so that you're not recreating it all of the time. Okay, so five

key strategies, if you decide that the hybrid or infinite

skill experience is the right one for you, is that number one

is, you know, once you've mapped out your customer experience,

and you've looked at, you know, like how do I help people go

from point A to point B?

Then you need to develop a robust onboarding systems. How

do people like what happens when they purchase? What do they need

to know about when they first come in? How do they get access

to the, to your platform? How do they navigate through your

platform? What are the expectations, always think about

this, like, if you're going to a live event, right, a training

or, or a workshop or something else, like the very first thing

that you always get when you go to that is like, Hey, everybody,

here's the agenda. Here's where the bathrooms are, here's where

you can go to do this, here's where you can find food or

drinks or whatever else that you need, right? Like, there's just

a moment in time where the facilitator pauses and says,

Hey, I know that you may be thinking about this in your head

and acknowledging it right. The other thing is, like most of the

time, when you walk into a workshop or a training, that

instructor or facilitator is going to come up and introduce

themselves to you, right? Hey, I'm so and so it's so great to

have you here today, thanks for showing up. Just a little simple

introduction makes a huge difference. And then kind of

giving people the rules of the road, like, I'm not going to

stop every, you know, 40 minutes to so you can. So we have a

bathroom break, right? Like if you have to go to the bathroom,

just get up and go. It's just down the hall, no problem, come

back in. Like people need to know what the norms are going to

be for the day. It's exactly the same thing. When you're talking

about creating an onboarding system, it doesn't matter if

it's online or offline, you need to give people the rule the

rules of the road, like here's how we, here's how we meet,

here's where you can schedule a call. Here's how you log in.

Here's how you navigate around to all the various places. So

really sit down and create that robust onboarding system. Again,

if you're in LEARN Academy in our mentorship program, there's

a whole training on how to build your onboarding system. And and

so it takes you through from that initial purchase all the

way to somebody feeling really comfortable coming in and

knowing how to navigate through your, your system.

Okay, number two scheduled regular live events. So often,

one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they are

like, oh, I want to have you know, office hours or q&a calls.

And they have them like at random times. And so they're

trying to be available for their customers. And so you know,

maybe they have one Tuesdays at nine and Thursdays at two and

Saturdays at noon. So while that's great, what it does is it

confuses people, right? And so if you're going to have those

three calls, don't have the records, first of all, but if

you're going to have three calls great, but then every single

week, it's the same. Don't change them up. So what what we

recommend is like one q&a call every week or every month or

every other week, or however you want to structure it, and it's

always at this time on this day. People want to know when to show

up, right? They want consistency, if they have to

constantly hunt around, it's too chaotic. Now, there's always

times where maybe you're on out of the office or you're on

vacation, or you're doing something else, and you have to

make a change. Great. But overall, try and make something

super consistent. So they know what to expect. And they know

when to show up. So just put them on your calendar for the

year and, and see how close you can get to being consistent. So

we have an office, our office our call, on Thursdays at one

o'clock, and it's always at Thursdays at one o'clock. And,

and so people know that if they have a question, if they need

coaching, if they need to talk to me, they're going to talk to

me at Thursday at one o'clock, so they can plan their week, if

I every week, just send out random times that I'm available,

that's not going to help somebody plan and you're just

adding more chaos. And so you want to eliminate the chaos in

the form of all, you know, they've got enough going on

learning and doing something new, it takes a lot of brain

calories. So they have enough going on, they don't need to try

and hunt around and figure out where where to go to meet and

what the timing is.

Okay, number three is leverage automated communication. This is

critical is that when you're first starting, and you're

trying to figure this game out, and you're doing your cohort,

this is a great time to start documenting, like when do I want

to send an email? When do I want to notify people of different

things that are happening? How do I want to help people stay

engaged and maybe send out various messages that keep them

motivated or or, you know, check ins or whatever, that is a time

for you to start documenting that so that you can use the

technology to send to those follow ups. But the your eye

should always be on? Like how do I set up consistent

communication? Based on how you want them to go through the

experience, right? So you go back to your journey map and

you're like, Okay, this is when I want to communicate with them.

This is, you know, I want them to be notified that they've done

certain things or whatever else, right? So always think about how

do you make that a consistent experience, once it's

consistent, then you can automate it. And, and so that

will, that in and of itself will change your life. Because

instead of sending out ad hoc random emails, you are able to

schedule those. I remember when we were running an agency, and

we had one or two emails we sent every single time we started a

new project. And, and my project manager was creating those

emails every single time. And I'm like, but isn't this email

basically the same for every customer? That we that we are

onboard? Like, aren't you just sending the same message? And he

was like, Well, yeah, I mean, it's basically the same thing.

And I'm like, great, that's awesome. Because we can put that

into an automation. And when you have that customer, and you're

ready for that email to go out, we can schedule that email to go

out and you don't have to rewrite it every single time. He

literally was like, sitting down and crafting the email, each and

every time we had a customer instead of just using, you know,

kind of the pre written template that he had created. So again,

us kind of think about that, from that perspective.

The fourth thing is create an online experience platform. So

this is super critical in the sense of like, a lot of times

people will think, Okay, well I'm just gonna put my course

assets in a membership site, and you know, just like create a

bunch of videos and throw them out there. When instead what

you're doing is you're creating an experience for people and

putting it into a platform that allows them to go through that

experience in the way that you want them to, so that they can

get results and have a great a great experience. Right? So

you're you're planning every aspect of that. So it's not just

videos, it's it's a place for them to interact. It's a place

for them to ask questions, it's a place for them to connect and

share with other people. The more you make it a supportive

and collaborative environment with the the various training

assets that you have in there, the more it becomes sticky for

them, the more that they're in there. Like, imagine if Facebook

was just a bunch of videos, right? Nobody would go in there.

It's the curated experience. That is a that brings people

back over and over and over again.

And then the fifth thing is like gather and implement feedback

constantly being asking for feedback. what's working, what's

not working? How can I add this? What's what's missing? Like all

the things, when you're doing a cohort launch, this is really

easy, because you're gonna have your super fans who are going

through it with you, especially in your beta launch. When

you're, when you're moving to a more hybrid experience, it's,

you know, building that in as part of the entire experience,

is helping them be able to give you feedback, it'll, it'll make

a huge difference in, in how your experience sort of is

living and breathing. Okay, so that is the difference, the pros

and the cons, the strategies for how do you build the right

business model that will help you scale. And again, like, I

strongly believe that the the hybrid or infinite scale method,

and model is going to be the one that's gonna scale because

regardless of how many people you put into that model, you're

not adding additional time, right, you're not like gonna max

out in time, like you would, if you're doing one on one, or even

when you're doing cohort like you can't do 1000s and 1000s of

people in a cohort doesn't work that way. Because there's so

much teaching and showing up live in nothing is necessarily

consistent, right, and so ever been, will give you that. But

most of the time, you're not, you're not engaged in the

experience. And so it's not helping you, and it's not

serving your customers, because ultimately, at the end of the

day, your customers are going to need some accountability and

some, some coaching to get past some of the obstacles and

hurdles that they're going to have along the way. So your

retention rates are going to be a lot higher with a hybrid

model. And you're going to be able to continue to grow and

scale. So there you go, that is the differences between the

launches. And it will help you not only grow your business, be

in the right business model that will help support you and your

customers. But it's going to help your customers become more

successful, so that they're getting results. They're moving

up in levels, and they're staying with you. Because you

have been able to create a curated experience that moves

them to the next phase. So there you go. If you're interested in

talking more about the hybrid or infinite scale model, if it

sounds like oh, you know, you've got one or two of the other

models, and you're not quite sure how to put them together

and what that looks like.

Give me a shout the bottom of this in the show notes or in the

video or in the blog, wherever you're looking at this. There

should be a link to schedule a free discovery call. And then we

can talk about like, what model are you in maybe you don't know,

maybe you're just sort of grabbing things from each model.

And you're not exactly sure how they all fit together so that

you can leverage your time and attention. And it's a great way

to kind of figure that out is to jump into that free discovery

call. So I look forward to speaking with you. And in the

meantime, really determine like which model are you following in

which one makes the most sense for you and your business? All

right. Have a great day.