My annual Black Friday sale over at BrentOzar.com just finished. Every year, I try different experiments with it – changing bundles, adding lifetime memberships, adding buy-now-pay-later, etc. One of this year’s experiments was to add live classes back into the mix.
When I launched them in October, I explained that the time had come to update the material for SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL DB, and as long as I had to record them myself to update the material, I might as well teach the classes live.
I didn’t offer a Live Class Season Pass as I have in the past. That option was wildly popular because people could just pay once and attend any class that their schedule permitted. However, I didn’t wanna offer that this time around because I was going to teach very few live classes, and I was only going to teach them in one time zone (US-friendly). Instead, I just let people buy tickets for a specific class on a specific date.
And… only 3 people did.
1 person bought a single ticket for a single date of Mastering Index Tuning, another person bought a single ticket for Mastering Query Tuning, and one person for Mastering Server Tuning. That’s it.
You might say, “Well, Brent, maybe the stuff you teach is no longer relevant, or people have heard enough of you.” But here’s the wild part: the recorded class sales were fine. It was only the live classes that simply didn’t sell.
I did sell a handful of seats to the cheaper Fundamentals Week class, so that one will stay on the schedule, and I’ll continue to sell tickets for that.
But my schedule just completely freed up for 2024, hahaha, since I don’t have to be home on specific dates to teach the Mastering classes. I love the bejeezus out of that. I’ll start recording the updated Mastering classes next week, doing that on my own schedule, and updating the recordings in folks’ accounts. That gives me more time to work on new stuff.
And to drive around. By the way, we wrapped Sabine in metallic pink for the Barbie movie this summer. It turned out really well.