Jacques Hopkins: How to Make $40,000 Per Month Selling Online Piano Courses

Welcome to the Scaling Success Stories series!

If you’re new to this series, I ask online entrepreneurs questions regarding growing and scaling their business.

This is the series description:

You can get your fill of online business tips by reading the other interviews on the Scaling Success Stories page.

Interview with Jacques Hopkins from Piano In 21 Days and The Online Course Guy

It was my pleasure interviewing Jacques Hopkins, founder of Piano In 21 Days, the wildly successful 21-day piano course that teaches you how to play your favorite songs and The Online Course Guy, where he coaches course creators on how to achieve the success he did. A former engineer, Jacques brings his knowledge of systemization and automation to the online business world. He now makes upwards of $40,000 per month selling online courses.

Check out what Jacques had to say to my questions!

1. Why did you start an online business and how does your passion still drive your business’ growth today?

When I read The 4-Hour Workweek back in my senior year in college in 2008, that was a paradigm shift for me.

I hadn’t realized that online businesses had so much potential for passive income.

The idea of being able to travel a lot and still make money was appealing. The concept of digital products, where someone buys something from you and you don’t have to ship them a product — all of that was a total mindset shift for me.

It sounded amazing!

I pursued several different businesses over the next couple of years, but I also was just graduating from college. So I still went and got a job, where I ended up working an engineer for 8 years.

All the while I was still trying to start a business of some sort, but nothing was successful until I decided to make a piano course. So it was really a matter of trial and error on the way to becoming successful.

The piano is not the thing I am most passionate about, but it’s something I like and it’s a hobby of mine. I have a different way of going about learning piano that has really resonated with other people.

So I do very much enjoy getting the opportunity to teach people all over the world how to play the piano.

But I’m more passionate about online business, and online courses specifically.

I see the possibility that they hold for people, and what they’ve done for my life. That passion has driven my business growth because I’ve created a separate business: The Online Course Guy.

This is where I can do coaching and consulting on online courses, which is probably what I am most passionate about. But that first business is what allowed me to develop the expertise to create this second business.

The passive income from Piano In 21 Days makes money without me having to work full-time hours, so a couple of years ago I was able to sit back and ask myself “what do I want to do with my life now?”

And, I realized that I wanted to focus on helping other people make online courses, too.

2. At what point did you realize that your business was “taking off” and that you could really make money from it?

It wasn’t easy.

Back in 2013 when I first got the idea for my course, I thought that just by the act of building it, it would be successful.

But, when I hit “Launch,” it wasn’t a runaway success.

I had been working on this for 8 months and tried to build up a little bit of a list and an audience, but I didn’t make a single sale until the the next day.

It was very demoralizing.

But, when I did make that first sale and made money online for the very first time, I went from a big low to a really big high. That said, my business certainly didn’t take off in 2013, or even 2014.

Even into late 2015, when I decided to quit my job, I was only making about $1,000 a month from course income.

Fortunately, we had already paid off our mortgage, and my wife and I had saved up enough to live off our savings frugally for a year. We had a 6-month old daughter at the time.

The course really started taking off once I started working on it as my new full-time job.

I added more content, I redid the course, I started using Google Ads (Adwords).

Pouring my effort into it helped me see a lot more results.

Loading new videos on YouTube, engaging with my email list, and fine-tuning my funnel got me to the point where my course started to take off.

Within a few months, we went from $1,000/month to $10,000/month. Then to $20,000/month and $30,000/month. That all happened in 2016. Giving my course the time and attention it needed made the difference.

3.  At what point did you realize you were living the life you wanted to?

By early 2017, I had not only built up my business, but I was also able to start outsourcing more and scaling back my time spent working on the course each day.

Until then, I had been making tens of thousands of dollars a month, but I was working like a crazy person.

And that’s not what I wanted.

So, I started getting a good team around me and my business.

It turned out that outsourcing was just as effective, and maybe even more effective than what I had been doing already.

Now I was able to stay in my lane and have experts helping me in their lanes.

I was finally able to ask myself that question I mentioned earlier, “Now what do I want to do with the rest of my time?” And, in answering it I created my second brand, The Online Course Guy.

4. One of the biggest fears of outsourcing is trusting the people you hire to run your business the way you would. How did you overcome this and where did you find the right freelancers and employees to help you grow your business?

I started outsourcing with a person from the Philippines helping me full-time as a general VA.

I thought that was what you had to do…

Have someone working full-time hours.

She worked for me for almost four years doing generic, repeatable tasks. At first, I had very little trust, but she built up trust by doing good work.

Over time, I was able to give her more and more responsibility and access.

Eventually, I started outsourcing more dedicated and specific tasks. My VA was working on general tasks, but I wanted to outsource video production, customer support, blog writing, SEO, Google Ads, and other things as well.

Once you start outsourcing, it’s kind of addictive!

As long as you vet people properly at the beginning, you can start out with a greater amount of trust at the beginning.

Not complete trust, of course!

It has to be built up over time.

For example, take the person I hired to help manage my email inbox and customer support requests.

At first, I literally copied and pasted all the support requests I would get into a spreadsheet for her. She would write her responses in that spreadsheet, I would give her feedback, and then I would copy the response back into my email to reply to the original request.

It was a very involved process, but in the beginning I didn’t have that trust to let this person get right into my email inbox. That trust was built up over a couple of months, and eventually she had full reign over that the inbox.

5. A common myth is that as you grow and scale your business, you have to sell your soul to make money, especially when you venture into paid advertising. How do you debunk this myth in your business?

I think that myth implies that to really make money or be successful, you have to go about things in a shady way.

But, what I’ve found is that I make the most money and am the most successful when I am as transparent and genuine as possible.Trying to interact with as many people as possible, listening to what they are asking for, and trying to give them what they need is important.

For example, there are two bonus sections of my course that exist specifically because of student feedback. For the first couple of years, people would ask for a lot of help with hand coordination.

I heard from a lot of people saying, “I can’t get my hands to do two different things on the piano at the same time!”

I didn’t realize this was going to be a struggle for so many people, but when I saw the pattern I realized I needed to address it.

I made a hand coordination bonus course to complement my main course, and people love it!

They see that I’m listening and I’m delivering what they need. The bonus is there as a selling point, people enjoy it, and I now get almost no support requests related to hand coordination.

So in my opinion, the best way to debunk the myth of selling your soul is to be as genuine as possible. Building trust matters.

6. Why do you think most people fail to grow their businesses and what advice would you offer them to keep pushing, despite all the setbacks?

I think most people fail because results aren’t happening fast enough, they’re not staying consistent, and they give up too easily.

Specifically for online courses, I recommend people pick a platform and stick with a consistent posting schedule. Whether it’s YouTube, a podcast, a blog, even Instagram: pick one.

Don’t try to be everywhere at once.

And be consistent! Have a regular posting schedule, make your content as high-quality as possible.

Use these free platforms to find out what people in your audience are asking for, and then find a way to give it to them. Set up strong CTAs, and again, build consistency. Don’t just post five videos and then give up when you don’t get immediate traction.

7. How important has niching down been (no matter how hard it hurts) to your business’ growth and profitability?

The way I niched down with my piano course was to emphasize learning quickly and learning to play modern music.

I tell my students…

You’re going to learn quickly, you’re going to do it without sheet music, and you won’t have to play any old or antiquated songs.

That’s been hugely important because that is what sets me apart.

If you search “top online piano courses” or “how to learn piano online,” and you start comparing the options, Piano In 21 Days stands out to people who don’t want to take years and years to play the piano or become professional pianists.

Based on my sales, it’s clear to me that this is resonating with people.

8. What do you attribute your success to and how do you explain it? Do you think the same strategies will help you reach your next monetization goals? Why or why not?

As I’ve mentioned, listening to my audience and finding my niche have been huge factors in my success.

But also, being my own personal brand is important to me. When a person enrolls in Piano In 21 Days, they’re not only getting piano — learning resources, they’re getting me, Jacques Hopkins, a real person who cares about their success.

If you take a look at my website pianoin21days.com, it doesn’t feel corporate — it feels personal.

There’s a picture of me right there introducing my course.

I want Piano In 21 Days to be synonymous with Jacques Hopkins, and I think that’s why a lot of people enroll. It’s not just about learning piano in 21 days, it’s about learning piano from me.

For whatever reason, I resonate with certain types of people. And, I think that has really helped me become successful.

9. To scale, you really need to have a systemized business. What steps have you taken to build those systems and how do you optimize them?

I’m all about systems.

When I was working as an engineer, my title was Automation Engineer. We automated processes in chemical plants. So, I definitely have a background in automation, and that is how my mind works.

I love automating and systemizing things.

For any repeatable process in my business, I or my team will go through a checklist to make sure that every step of the process is done properly each time.

It’s a matter of recognizing which processes are repeatable and making checklists or spreadsheets to track them.

That way it’s not just me or someone else keeping track of things in our heads!

For systemized businesses, I think it’s also important to monitor KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

This helps me make sure that the train stays on the track. My assistant puts together a daily report for me seven days a week and I check it every morning.

My daily report includes web traffic, opt-ins and conversions, new subscribers, sales broken down by new and recurring sales, affiliate revenue, and more.

When I look at that report each morning and see that everything is on track, I can feel comfortable spending the rest of my day playing with my kids, going on a trip, maybe not even doing anything else business-related.

It allows me to feel confident that I know what’s going on and that the train is still on the track.

10.  If you could speak face-to-face with yourself when you first started your business, what pearls of wisdom would you impart?

I would definitely say…

Don’t be afraid to outsource. Even though you’re on a budget, with the internet it’s so easy to find people all over the world for much less than you would think. And you can find people who are incredible at what they do.

Video editing is probably the first thing I should have outsourced. I’m not very good at it, so my product would have been a lot better if I had outsourced earlier.

My video editor these days is from Romania: he charges about $12/hour and he’s amazing.

I waited far too long to outsource this kind of thing.

I would also say…

Make sure to stay consistent on your platform. In my case, this means YouTube. To this day, most of my traffic comes from my YouTube channel. That’s basically free traffic, and I can only imagine that I’d be even more successful today if I’d continued doing a weekly video ever since I got started.

But once you get success, it’s easy to get complacent.

I was always attracted to passive income, so once I started getting passive income it was easy to become more passive. 😉

About Jacques Hopkins

Jacques Hopkins worked as an engineer for eight years before quitting his job and turning his biggest hobby into a highly successful online piano course. Today, he supports his family with the passive income from his course, while teaching others to do the same. Check out the newest version of Jacques’ course here at PianoIn21Days.com, plus his podcast and online course training at TheOnlineCourseGuy.com.

Conclusion

Thanks for participating in my series, Jacques!

As you can tell, it’s NOT EASY growing and scaling an online business, but there are some things you can do to aid you in the process.

Neither is playing different rhythms and melodies with your two hands on the piano. Trust me… there’s a reason I only play one song. 

Inspired by Jacques?

Now, it’s your turn!

I assembled the Scaling Blueprint to show you how to…

• Outsource Effectively
• Systemize Your Business
• Shatter Your Revenue Goals

After working with six-figure and seven-figure clients, I know the difference between how they function.

Let me help you start scaling successfully.

Get My FREE Blueprint!

Cheers to future success!