Kevon Cheung: Hey, Chris, welcome here
Chris Ngo: Hey Kevon, thanks for inviting me. I actually have to say it was your, I found your book early in my X/Twitter game and that really helped me, not jump into all the different strategies out there that may or may not have been genuine. So thanks for letting me read your book. And I think it was almost literally a year ago, a February-ish, I read that.
Kevon Cheung: Wow. Thank you so much. Yeah. I think last time you told me about you reading my book, I'm like, Oh, I didn't, I didn't know that. So I lost track of that, but thank you for saying that. Yeah.
Chris Ngo: Really well put.
Kevon Cheung: Today, I want to talk about pricing. But then I was wondering why you choose to focus on the topic pricing. And then I was thinking there must be a horrifying story that trigger you to say, Oh, this is amazing. I need to share this with people. So what's the story like?
Chris Ngo: Well, there's a few stories. One of the ones I can tell you what happens when you don't price correctly and you don't know how to do it. So everyone tells you to increase your rates or charge more and you hear about this and just charge this. So I, I tried to increase my rates. I'm a physician.
Chris Ngo: So I had a certain rate, cash pay, direct pay practice. So I increased my rates a little and then tried to attack on stuff afterwards and, the session went longer and I said, okay, well, they're expecting this amount. And then I said, well, we went to 15 minute things over. And so it's going to be this plus this.
Chris Ngo: And she was like, super like red pissed. And she said, well, that's not how much this previous person that referred me, paid for the service. And so that was not the correct way to do that. And you could just feel like everything getting hot and embarrassing and yeah, so it's no fun indeed. So the pricing journey really, once I finally figured out how to do this pricing thing, then it changed a lot of the perspective on pricing.
Kevon Cheung: Awesome. And when was this?
Chris Ngo: So to give some context, I opened my, I was forced into, not forced, but I, I took a leap of faith and opened up my medical practice straight out of medical training. We call that residency and started my medical practice back in 2012. And with no business background, no understanding, had no game plan of where to go and how to do anything. And I got an opportunity and I took it for the space and, just jumped in to learn how to make an S corporation, financial stuff, do all the practice stuff in like three months or less. And I just jumped in for eight years, basically, of the standard of pricing in our industry. But this is the thing. We, our expectation is that we have to serve people, we have to help people. And particularly my specialty involved a lot of custom, customization on working with people. And so that was not allowing my overhead to be met.
Chris Ngo: It was like the margin was hardly anything. And so you know, you have a family too, so I would come back like, leave early in the morning, and the drive was 50 plus minutes to my office, and I'd come back, and like, my family had already gone to bed, or my dinner was in the microwave, and so you're doing everything you're supposed to do about filling your schedule and making an impact on all these patients, and, but you're not spending time with your family, so the down point was, like, there's like, one cent left in my savings account, and so I got desperate and tried a better way to run the business.
Kevon Cheung: I see. Got it. So before we dive into that, I hear you talk about family. I already mentioned, I wanted to invite you because you're a very genuine person. So I'm wondering about you as a person, like before we go so far in your story, like, what do you care most? Like what's your key value in life? Can you share a little bit about that?
Chris Ngo: I mean, the key value is really just trying to help people improve, become better, better versions of themselves. Because that improves the relationships, like my wife and I, and even my stepdaughter. We, you know, how sometimes you hear people talk bad about their spouses or other family members. I mean, we don't do that. We try to understand the situation, communicate, and then see how we can improve. And sometimes, you know, you're in a situation like, oh, they're telling me this. But then a few months later, you're like, oh, they're right and going through this. So it's a constant, it's like a healthy competition of constantly improving yourself.
Chris Ngo: And then because of my background as alternative healing and other stuff like that, we're always trying to find ways to help more people, improve their lives and be able to empower themselves so that they don't have to depend on anyone. And that's, that's part of the reason how all this is tying together.
Kevon Cheung: Oh, that's really cool. I think this is, this might be the first time I hear about alternative healing. I'm not, yeah, I'm not familiar with that space, so this is new news to me. So, exciting to learn more about it. Going back to your story, so doctor, and then now teaching about pricing. I guess you were using some kind of pricing strategies that piss off the client.
Kevon Cheung: When did that happen? Was it early in your practice, like 2012, or did it happen in the last few years when you decided, okay, maybe I should come out and share this strategy with people?
Chris Ngo: When we come out of residency, we're all taught to Do billing a certain way. Luckily I don't have to deal with insurance because of my skill set but I kept the same industry standard of pricing from like 2012 all the way to 2018. Like, I hadn't raised at all, and so, and I started seeing people longer, I started getting more complicated cases, and like I said, the margin hadn't changed, and I was just working more. Like, the capacity, the max people I could see in a month was 60 appointments. And it still didn't make a huge impact.
Chris Ngo: I never had hit it. You know, the entrepreneur industry standard of 10, 000 or more a month. I didn't even hit that yet. So in 2018, I learned that, oh, you can actually raise prices. We can actually do this thing. I learned this from the SaaS industry and so I tried that. And that's when the horrible stories went. Then, I had to figure something out and I came across actually copywriting. I didn't know what that was. Apparently everyone knows about that on X or Twitter, but I didn't know what that was back then in 2018. Everyone talked about copywriting. It'd be like, you help with patents or you help with intellectual property. So I delved into that and started messing around with that for a little, in addition to my physician practice. In one of the freelance groups, they just posted something about pricing and I just saw like how, there's a video online with Chris Do, part of The Futur, but how he does, value based pricing specifically to really find out what the person needs and then base a price off of that. And so you're able to actually price custom work according to what the person actually needs versus just trying to shove someone into this very narrow band of like, here's my service or here's my product. I'm going to try to navigate you and to fit in this peg. And a lot of time it doesn't work. So then you need to have more volume. And so I tried that out and tested that out. And, within a few weeks of learning that process, three weeks, I test on my first patient and then, it worked. And then I did a second one. So like within two months, I was able to generate revenue from what would have taken me a hundred clients or patient slots was done with four.
Kevon Cheung: Wait. So I'm so curious how did the jump happen? Now, I'm getting curious about the actual setup. Is this something that is very complicated to explain or is it, is it something you can quickly go through? Like an introduction.
Chris Ngo: How I learned it was, I actually read the book. It was actually made for Blair Enns. You can look him up. He's a great, he's a great innovator in the space for the creative agencies for the creative space. And so, you know, this book was written for people dealing with 5,6,7, 8-figure companies and how to talk with them and do all that. For a simple solopreneur, like myself, a solo provider, service provider, like, how do you translate all this? And also it's not B2B. I work with clients and patients that don't have a business, right? So I tested out just talking and learning how to understand people through the search, simple framework that we learned and then translated that more to the emotional side versus just strictly business side. And people wanted more. An example was I had a patient, this is the second one. I had a patient coming to me every couple weeks or every three weeks for $200 a session. We weren't getting anywhere. And so I learned this method a few weeks ago and then I said, Oh, look, let's start over. Let's figure out what you really want. And so she had a budget of like $5, 000. And I said, okay, I'll make some options, show these to you. And this is the most mind blowing, like it doesn't click in your head. I showed her the piece of paper, one piece of paper. That's how we do it with four columns and said, this is what we can do for me. It was ranging from $15, 000 down to $2, 500. And she was just staring at the paper as I was explaining it. And she's like, you do all this for me. Like look at the $15, 000 and I'm like, well, yeah, that's why it's there. No, like really. And so I didn't even get to finish the column. She's like, I think I can do this. I don't have a family. I'm not taking care of anyone.
Chris Ngo: I have some stuff and savings. I really want to do this. So her grumbling about $200 per hour to suddenly wanting to pay $15, 000 for 14 weeks of help. It didn't compute. And then it happened over and over and over again. So yeah, that's sort of how that started.
Kevon Cheung: That's a really good intro. Thank you. It's very different from where I am and where you are, because from what I see, like you are a service provider. So when you, when you start out testing the strategies, you already, you're charging $200 per session. So you have actual value to deliver and to play around, but I have been struggling with pricing myself because I am not a service provider.
Kevon Cheung: I build courses. I write books and I sell these digital products. So in the early days, you know, I struggle with my confidence, like, Oh, who am I to charge that high? I should start low and build up a bigger audience and then snowball to testimonials to feedback. So my first cohort was free because I had no teaching materials.
Kevon Cheung: I don't know what to teach. So I just get tester for free and then second one, 50 bucks. And then a hundred bucks, 40, 100 bucks, 800 bucks. And even like a bigger offer, like $2, 000 plan. I saw on your website, you said you would share about how people can look into how someone value something. And then you just share a little bit in the story as well.
Kevon Cheung: So I'm curious, how do you access into how someone view about value and then come up with the right pricing for that? And especially in people who are not a service provider.
Chris Ngo: Yeah. So the interesting thing with that is in our system, the power per pricing system, we look at it as all one continuous thing and people just enter The ladder at different points, right? So, I like to really differentiate between value is value. I'll get there in a second, but you just really differentiate into two things.
Chris Ngo: You either are selling services or you're selling products. That's like the dividing line, right? Now, the issue is some people sort of conflate the two, like they sort of mix it together. So they think they're doing a service, but they're really selling a product or someone's like things are selling a product and they're really doing a service. Like, if you ever coached anyone, that's a service provider. You're providing someone a service to improve their situation. If you ever analyze someone's course for them, you're providing a service, it's not a product, for example. So, a service is basically spending time and effort to do something for someone. Usually a one on one type of situation where you're front facing with someone helping you. And a product is basically one to many where you can scale it. Services are always blocked by capacity, which is why a lot of people try to create products because they are burned out from that. Or they just jump into products because they hear all the horror stories. But products are actually a lot harder to do from the beginning as you've gone through the last two or three years, I believe. So, the product piece can be anything like a curriculum, a program, a workshop, all the way down to like a free PDF, we'll just say digital physical products. And so there's different strategies for pricing on both.
Chris Ngo: Products always need more, take a lot more time to get income because there's product, you have to learn all these micro skills like product development, marketing, sales, copywriting, customer service. you know, all these things that don't come with a service. Service, you just have to talk to the person, do something, and you get instantaneous feedback. So, those are two of the biggest differences, and you get a lot more cash up front. Now, if you do products over time, then you actually get a lot more, cash on the long run for less effort. If it takes off because you have a system, it's going well, you don't have to be there and you can scale. Whereas the service, the longer you go, for more effort, the cash flow starts decreasing unless you hire or scale.
Chris Ngo: And then there's more expenses with that. So those are the two differences. How that ties in with value is the biggest thing I learned from a value standpoint is values largely subjective. My value system is not the same as your value system. And sometimes when we make our products, price our products, price our services, we're projecting our value system onto people. And so we are like, I don't, I would never pay for that. And this person is probably never going to pay for that. So I'm going to keep it low. And what happens is the low ticket side or the low price versus a high price. I have a graph that I usually show, there's a low ticket side and a high ticket side. Most people will try high ticket because everyone tells them to high price, but then you have to know sales really well. And so when they get rejected, then their self esteem gets affected. They don't think they're good enough and yada, yada. So they go back to the lower end, but then when you do only focus on the lower end, because most people are like, well, it's just this low price. If they don't get a result, that's okay. So your self esteem isn't affected, but you're not committed to the person. Then you have to learn marketing, scaling, and other things to accommodate for, as you know, to accommodate for that large price margin. So getting a thousand people to take a course versus getting 10 people to take a course to say, reach 10 thousand are entirely two different scenarios. Does it make sense?
Kevon Cheung: Yeah. Yeah. So my main takeaway there is you have to really look into who the people you're serving and selling to. And I guess one of my recent encounter is I noticed like my course, my main program, when I sell it for 600, 800 or above, I attract a certain kind of people. And then I have another challenge, which is 50 bucks.
Kevon Cheung: And I thought, okay, maybe some people might eventually sign up to my main program. It doesn't happen. I think it attracts a different kind of audience. So the price point affects who you bring in as well.
Chris Ngo: Precisely. And, you know, there's Alex Ramos, he talks about an experiment with like three different wines and there's a study and they priced it from low to high. And then people, when they came in, they said, Oh, obviously the more expensive wine tastes better, right? They have wine tasters and all that stuff.
Chris Ngo: And then come to find as the same wine, the only difference was the price. So there is a piece, but, you know, what we consider maybe a high ticket thing, like 10, 000, 20, 000, 30, 000, that's actually small if you're working with other organizations or other companies. So it's all relative. I think sometimes we focus too much on how is my product going to compare to everything else or how's my service going to compare to everything else and people won't value it because of this or to value it because of that. But what we, when we go through our process. We actually have the person focus on all the things that brought them value so they can start valuing themselves. That's the first step. They have to value themselves because that's the foundation, that's level. We call it level zero, but it's not really talked about about how to value yourself and then translate that to your products or your services in such a way and then determine how the people you're talking to what they value. And so for us, if you only have one price, there's a 50-50 percent chance that the person might do that so you have to get double the leads or more. If you have options though, you can actually figure, it's like you're testing three products or three services at once when you have options, because now you can figure out where the person's value truly lies because value is subjective. And then what I, we had a new student recently, he had three options for his services. They only picked all the high ones. So I'm like, you know, you have to shift your services over or your prices over because they value it differently.
Kevon Cheung: Yeah. I tried that. I guess, maybe after one year of my journey. Because the first year was completely for building trust and credibility, and I started offering three prices. And my interesting finding is yeah, there are some people who would just go for the highest tier. And it's not like I need to put in more coaching hours or anything.
Kevon Cheung: It's about like the packaging. Like I can say unlimited cohort, unlimited community access. And that already get people to sign up to the highest tier without your active input of time. That's really amazing. But I want to ask you, because you talk about, wine. Can I ask you a question? You know so much about value and pricing.
Kevon Cheung: So when you go to the restaurant, if you are ordering a bottle of wine, which one do you choose now?
Chris Ngo: Well, I don't, I personally don't drink, but, regardless of what you would order, you would look at like, what am I going to get? So back in the day, like, obviously, say like a scotch or something. And you're like, oh, it's a 50-year scotch or 20-year, 12-year scotch and then it was more expensive because there's more perceived value around it. But it's perceived value, right? If you're not a drinker, there's no value. Right? A designer bag has no value. A Coca Cola or a soda for $5, when you're at a game or out and about and you're really thirsty and you're hungry, you'd be willing to pay $5 to $10 for that. But if you were in the supermarket and you just went and looked and you're like $5, I'm not paying for that. So value is also situational for the context that you're in. Where you ever, you know, if you translate this business, wherever your customer is at in their life and the pain points it's hitting, that's where the value is going to be important.
Kevon Cheung: That's right. That's why I like Disney amusement park. They charge so much for water or we're actually a music festival. They charge crazy for water because you don't have access to that. I used to pick the second lowest priced wine. I'm not a big drinker, but we do enjoy a glass or two with our family and wife. But now, I always go for the lowest price because it's just the same after all.
Chris Ngo: Yep. Oh, I mean, it's just depends on what you, that's what it comes down to value. The situation that calls for it, like you're not a wine connoisseur. So in that case, you're like, I don't need to know the back history. I don't need to know where the grapes were to create this wine, process and all that kind of stuff. You just want to enjoy, sit back, have fun. And so you..
Kevon Cheung: Yeah, functional.
Chris Ngo: Yes. Right. So the it's really very personalized. And once you understand that value is so personalized, you stop trying to push your value or make people see that there's value in something. Because that's what people say is give value, give value, give value. That's my mistake. To overdo everything to try to give value, but it wasn't valuable because they just jumped to the cheapest thing. If there's something cheaper that could provide that service.
Kevon Cheung: So you talk about favoring you, yourself, and your client on your pricing page, how do you favor your client? What do you look? What perspective do you see so that you can create an offer that favor them? What are some tips that you can give us?
Chris Ngo: If you're talking about say, well, the biggest thing is listening. We teach sort of unconditional listening. So unconditional listening is listening to something without expecting something in return. If I was to tell you, Oh, I'm thinking about building in public. I want to create a course. Automatically, most people, if you're in that space would be thinking, Oh, if they want to build in public, they're going to need this to go and need this. You start thinking about all these trigger words that, that go. Now you've just stopped listening. Cause you've already stopped. Jump used to already jumped to solutions for this person and so you can't figure out the context. So unconditional listening, when we talk to people, we, I try to turn off in my brain all the solutions that I could come up with and listen to the exact context and the words and everything that's going on with that person. And then from there, we figure out where they want to go, what they actually want, and how would they know they're getting there, and then what they would pay for that. And so once I find out what they would pay for, if they could have that, then that's when I create my options and then now they just pay for something that is valuable to them across the options within the budget range that they have, like that first or second client I had.
Kevon Cheung: Just to continue with that story, because still intrigued about like someone going for $200 per session. And then you have this $15, 000 package for 14 weeks? Okay. What do they value most in that new package offer that makes them jump to it?
Chris Ngo: I think for them, they wanted the attention and they wanted the accessibility and the ability to text me or email me anytime or have access they could have access to me once a week. Obviously gain treatment and then some personalized recommendations for them over those 14 weeks.
Chris Ngo: When I first started, the biggest issue was, does this just work for me or does this work for someone else? And so then I took on some private clients and, and help them through it. And within a few weeks, they did the same, put the same results. And then I tested as in a small group, and they produced results, saved their practice.
Chris Ngo: And then I tested it in other industries. And they also produced results. We had a tutor. She was struggling and she used some of the principles. And then she, within like six weeks or something, she got someone that paid her entire month of revenue than she normally would need from one client versus 39 lessons and 39 clients, and I don't remember how many. And so another student eventually.. I think the joke is he, three clients equals 46 clients or something like that. So it really changed the scope of how they help people and created boundaries and value themselves and really want to help the person. It's like this weird exchange that occurs. You're motivated to be creative and help people.
Kevon Cheung: so true. I experienced with the support. Ongoing support as well. So when people sign up to my course, usually they're looking at a cohort or the materials, but then the highest tier will say priority support from Kevon and I think people like that. It's not like they were going to message me every day, but it's like, Oh, it's good to know there's a person if I need. them to answer some questions.
Chris Ngo: Yeah, and that's that certainty. So some people like certainty. Some people like significance, some like, if you look at the six human needs, some people like that certainty that they know what's coming next. Other people like the attention. Other people like the ability to contribute or that connection. There's just a different, there's just different reasons for why people do things and you don't know what they are. So with products, for example, you have to just cast a wider net. And then narrow in, but with services, the reason why we like to start with that first for a lot of people, especially when they're starting out, is people are paying you for something, and then you can figure out the pain points from a paying client, and then from there, tweak your services and the things that you're doing over and over and over again.
Chris Ngo: Eventually, you can actually turn that into courses or products, for people. And since you already know people are paying for them, you get sort of easily streamlined. My current course, actually, I wrote the whole outline in five minutes.
Kevon Cheung: Because it's in your head, it's not like you need to create it. You just need to kind of write it down. Yeah. Okay. Good, good transition to what I really want to ask you because when I look at your, I know you from Twitter/X, right? So, I see your bio, I click in, and I consider that your storefront.
Kevon Cheung: And I see this amazing course. I, I really feel like you are tackling a really important problem, not just for service provider, but like, if anyone is listening to this, like if you're creating courses. Books is hard because the pricing is usually around that range or coaching programs or membership, I feel like you can also help them.
Kevon Cheung: So my question is at the bottom, you show $37. That's a very interesting product pricing strategy. And then of course, there are a bunch of stuff probably going on after you purchased a course. So I'm curious about how you design this experience.
Chris Ngo: Well, it was literally from experience, my experience, right? So this is why it's actually good to potentially at least do some sort of service because you have experience to back your course. I think anyone can create a course and anyone can teach, but expertise is based upon time and effort. And so, I was only able to make a course quicker, which is why I didn't do anything on social before that because I was, when I moved into transition from the in-person space to the online space in 2021, I didn't do any social for many years because I wanted to make sure the product was good. And so, how I came up with that was I followed, I broke down the process that people are struggling with because of our bigger program. People, not everyone can do that piece. And so, if you want to hear how I created a course, I actually bought my services for somebody, right? I remember I told you I wrote down the outline of the course, so I found someone that was trying to do some of the stuff and I said, look, it looks like you really want to do this, but you're struggling, right?
Chris Ngo: She was struggling. She couldn't figure it out. And so I said, look, I'll buy $2, 000 worth of my services. All I ask is you will beat a couple of times and just give me feedback or a testimonial. We met, I think, and I went through both courses, both programs, I think 10 hours total at the time. We split it up, but she was amazed by all of it. It like changed her whole perspective. And so from that feedback, I tweaked the course and made it into what it is now. And we used to give those live. So, I don't know if you want to hear my horror story about launching my first course, but that's..
Kevon Cheung: Oh, let's, let's hear about it. Horrifying story is always good.
Chris Ngo: Okay, so after I got results from that and got a lot of feedback and wording, that's how I made my sales page, right? A lot of it was from people's feedback. So when people read it, that was all their voice of customer data, we call it. That was all their words. *So the, I, I human hod*, we had a number of distractions and I said I would buy a deadline by December 2021, I would launch this thing. And so, after a coaching call with someone, I feel like, okay, I'm just going to do it. The sales page had just been finished, but nothing else on the back end, like all the automations, all this other stuff wasn't done yet. So I just launched it. I just opened it up and let a few people know.
Chris Ngo: This was three days before the course actually started because it was a live workshop. I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is, you know, you just feel all the stress like you're putting out in the world. Then all of a sudden you start seeing the Stripe notifications coming in. $50, $37, $54, $97, whatever, all this is starting coming in. And more people talked about it and brought it in. So by, in three days, I think I had 52 students for my first digital product. Which is not bad.
Kevon Cheung: Yeah, really good actually.
Chris Ngo: Eight grand total. So, but I didn't have any social. I didn't use Twitter. I didn't post on that forever. I didn't have Instagram. I didn't have an email list. I had like maybe 1500 on Facebook. Mostly just word to mouth and talking to people in my organizations.
Kevon Cheung: Wow. That shows the power of like, I think people get too attached to social media. I know because I teach that with my book and I know a lot of people only use social media and I think they see it as god or something. Like it can do everything for you but your story tells that it's not true.
Kevon Cheung: It's all about reaching the right people and then great work. People love to spread great work. And that's actually not a horror story. That's a fantastic story.
Chris Ngo: Well, this is the, not yet because I still have to make the slides for each day. I still have to write the emails for the course in real time. So staying up all night, my assistant was like stalling time sometimes as I was finishing the slides and, that's 40 something emails for a course.
Chris Ngo: So I'm writing them like in real time, writing the Facebook posts in real time, the sales page for the bigger offer. We ended up the bigger offer, hadn't even been created yet. It was a pilot. So, but the sales page for it broke and I didn't know what to do. So I basically had to make a Stripe link out of that and People still bought, it was very stressful. You know, chest pressure and all this other stuff, but everyone that we heard the feedback, they're like, this was amazing. We got so much out of it. What you perceive is different for people get, and that's valuable, right? Sometimes, we're too hard on ourselves. Because we want to make something good, but people don't know all those things that go on and they don't care really just want to have a good experience and that's what we gave them. And so we learned a lot from that one, tweaked some things, made it better, raised the price for the back end and people bought again.
Chris Ngo: We just kept on building it every time. I think we had four live launches with that. And so by the end of the, by the fourth one, it was much more clockwork. All the emails, everything was scheduled, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Kevon Cheung: Now that I realize you said this is a horror story. It reminds me of my, you know, my free cohort, the first one. Because I was selling it, no, I wasn't selling it. It was for free, but I was recruiting students when I had nothing. So I was doing exactly the same, creating materials like every single week and being really paranoid on the live calls because I don't even know if the materials were good.
Kevon Cheung: I guess the lesson here is if you don't have a horror story, if you're not going towards a horror story, you're too slow, you're making things too perfect before you sell it. It's all about getting feedback. It's not that important what you're exactly teaching at first. So the $37 price point, why is it not, $97, $147? Why is it $37? In my mind, it's like quite low. So what's the design of that and where do people go afterwards? There must be a special design behind it.
Chris Ngo: It's not too much of a design. I mean, originally the way it was trained to do that is you have a slow offer. $50 or low. There's no like trust needed. So people, if you really want to speed up your authority, have a low sub paying price. At least this is what we're taught people. And then you get to, I mean, this was a 10-day thing.
Chris Ngo: It wasn't just a three-day course. It was 10 days of core content and bonuses and interviews and, and extra stuff. So, making all that from scratch was a lot, but the whole idea is building trust, right? We talk about that in the space a lot, building trust. And so that builds trust and then you have a backend program. At the time it was 9, 000 to 2, 000 and then people sign up for that if they want to move to the next step. It's about getting a lot of people in the front end, low trust barrier. They experience your teaching, they experience what you do when they, you know, they help you. And this really shortens the duration of having to do the social media game of one to two years of creating value and authority and content and all that kind of stuff.
Chris Ngo: I didn't have time for that, nor did I know if my stuff was going to be accepted. So I just shortcutted it and just did a paying product, low cost, low price, and then seeing how people's response to it was. And then from there, it did well, and people bought the next program, and they got results almost immediately. And so then, from there, we just scaled it a little more, and raised the price on the back end. So the front end is not meant to, you know, profit from it, it's just meant to a relationship with people. Sort of like a lead magnet, but once again, lead magnets, most people don't look at or aren't free, so we want some skin in the game, especially with this important topic. And a lot of my original audience, they didn't have a lot of funds or a lot of people starting out from the beginning. So we want to give something that was able to really jumpstart them.
Kevon Cheung: Yeah, this is really smart. Also something that I'm heading towards because I have a lot of free resources, but I think it's time for me to add something.. As you said, under $50, but maybe, high enough, like $37 to qualify people because I talk to every single person, but that's actually not sustainable in the long run. So I do need to filter out people at some point. So.
Chris Ngo: Yeah, that's not sustainable.
Kevon Cheung: Oh, okay. You mean the talking to everyone part.
Chris Ngo: Yeah.
Kevon Cheung: Yeah. So I guess I need to change my strategy.
Kevon Cheung: Speaking of like talking to people, you said you got on social 2018 or is it 2020? So what brings you on Twitter? Why did you start?
Chris Ngo: December, 2022 is when I actually started looking at social, like I did. I have a different brand. Yeah. and Twitter for me, it was just originally just put my idea down. It's so easy text. I didn't have to worry about graphics or images or weird videos or this or that.
Chris Ngo: I just originally wanted to just put my thoughts down and I just committed to posting something daily for myself for 90 days at the time. And I moved it to 100 once I learned about another strategy, but I just, the goal was to post daily. I didn't care who's read it. I didn't care whatever.
Chris Ngo: I just wanted to post my thoughts. And eventually it attracted people and I had conversations with them. I did no Twitter strategy, right? I read your book, a few months later, but I just left comments. I replied to people. I DM. I didn't go out and DM people. I just replied to people that DM-ed me and I just had conversations in the comments.
Chris Ngo: And apparently that's what you're supposed to do. I didn't know that, and then they started following me, et cetera. And then that's just had those conversations and moved into different communities. I still post daily once a day, maybe twice a day sometimes, but I don't make it like a super priority to, I have to post 10, this or that. I just post what comes to mind. I don't schedule anything. Yeah, I'm probably not doing all the things you're not supposed to do in social media, but whatever.
Kevon Cheung: No, no, I think that That's why you're an amazing person that I come across on the platform, because everyone's trying so hard. Everyone is going crazy, like, this is my niche, so I'm going to talk about it three times a day, but you are just a human being. That's what draws me to you. I have one question that is about what I teach that I really want to ask you.
Kevon Cheung: So my whole framework is around building with your audience. Building with your fans or building with your students. So you have this $ 37 course, so I assume a lot of people go through it and then they get into your Facebook community. I'm curious to know, how do you work with the community to get more insights, get more feedback about what you're creating to improve your product and services.
Kevon Cheung: Can you share a few things that you're doing with the community?
Chris Ngo: Sure. So there's actually two parts to this. Services-wise, we try to get feedback from our clients, and et cetera. Now the product-wise, we're actually new at doing this version of it. We would do a live event, and it would be a pop up Facebook group, but then it would close down after every event. So it gives urgency for people to really.. It was amazing. Like you, you just see people really helping each other, really pushing people forward, posting examples of their services and their templates for it. And tweaking and helping people as they go through the course and and that was amazing to see all that.
Chris Ngo: At the end of every event, we'd have a prize and we'd show people how much commenting they do. And it was really neat. Just all the feedback. So we would gather all that feedback and then improve the course from there. And then when COVID pandemic opened up and more things opened up and our schedules opened up. My travel schedule got busier. It was harder to do the old way. We had some personal stuff go on to. So we couldn't do the normal. We're ramping up to these live launches, you know, two or three times a year, but then all of a sudden something hit and we couldn't do it. And so our schedule didn't allow that old model, so we had to come up with a new model. So we actually just transitioned into this newer model of making it available more often. So we're definitely learning with this Because people come in, we help them with their, their templates and some people don't post and some people do. Some people are engaging, some people haven't looked at the stuff. So we're learning how to engage people and what helps them. Recently we even just started emailing our list more to figure out what they needed to find the holes of how we can help them better. And we're, so we've been changing a lot of strategies in real time in the last five months.
Kevon Cheung: Got it. So a lot of one on one conversations. I guess you get a ton of insights from doing all the live calls as well, because I experienced that, like. I am trying to think about something about my business, like repositioning. I hosted a live event. I expected no one to show up. Six of my members showed up and we were just bouncing ideas about my business.
Kevon Cheung: So I learned so much from them. That's crazy. So I guess, yeah, it's the same for you.
Chris Ngo: We used to have a membership type of thing. the issue was that we would ask them what you guys need and they didn't know. Now, we are doing the approach of just taking all our expertise and experiences and putting it out there and seeing what starts working with the people and where the holes are.
Chris Ngo: There's some one-on-one conversation. There's some email feedback, and we also have feedback forms and surveys. At the end of the courses, people will give their inputs. And so that's actually also a reason why we made it much more available more often because the biggest one is like, I missed it. I couldn't join the cohort. I really want to do that.
Chris Ngo: And six months later, we didn't have it and they forget about it. So we're just making more available and and so people can move forward that are ready to move forward.
Kevon Cheung: Who are the people in your community right now? Because I know, say service provider, but honestly, I think what you're teaching can be useful for so many people. What kind of people are in there?
Chris Ngo: We have, you know, creators, we have healers, we have physicians, we have coaches. Varying from new to experienced. So random people would come had a imposter syndrome issues. So we're just tweaking all that kind of stuff. this really did help a lot of people understand themselves and let go of imposter syndrome. So the mindset is really key before any, any selling that goes on. It doesn't have to be as complicated because I've had a lot of people they've been in practice for where they did something, their business for 10 to 20 years and they still have value issues. Like, am I good enough? Can I raise my prices? Can I do this? So I not see this many people, all this stuff runs through your head. If you understand the value in relation to price, your context and your situation, it saved a lot of people from burning out.
Kevon Cheung: I love about conversations like this with you is like after this 45-minute chat, I want to learn so much more about you. There are a lot of things that you mentioned. I don't want to ask you right now, but it's all in my mind. Like I would love to continue chatting with you later on. Speaking of that, let's come to the end of the chat.
Kevon Cheung: Where can people find you? Because I go through LinkedIn and I click that link, but should people go through that or do you have another domain website?
Chris Ngo: The most active I'm on is Twitter. So just @DrChrisNgo. D R C H R I S N G O. That's my handle. And then Power Up Your Pricing is the main, you know, cheap $37-course that, you know, you can really start this process and get access. I have other Facebook accounts, but that's more for the alternative healing side. Yeah, those are the two main areas right now. Actually, I'm not active at all on LinkedIn. I still haven't figured out how to use that platform.
Kevon Cheung: Same here.
Chris Ngo: I'm most active on I would say, because the easiest for me to manage. Yeah.
Kevon Cheung: LinkedIn seems a bit weird. I tried and then I stop and then I wanted to try again. Maybe we'll figure this out together. Okay. Finale question. What's that one thing people keep telling you to do, but you keep rejecting?
Chris Ngo: Alright, so this is ironic. The one thing that people do that I keep on rejecting is actually raising the price for Power Up Your Pricing. People have valued it at least between even $500, the amount of stuff it has done for them. So we are finally going through this process of just making it available anytime.
Chris Ngo: We're actually realizing it's too valuable for that. So we're actually probably going to raise the price very soon to accommodate for that very reason. Because we've had a lot of people say, Oh, it's too cheap. There's probably nothing in it. Whereas it's a very full solution for where someone is out in their business. And so we might, we're probably just going to have to raise the price. I've pushed it off for so long. It's been what, 2021 to 2000. So over three years now. We're probably just going to raise the price now that we've tested it long enough in this new environment. And it's not as impactful because it's too low.
Chris Ngo: So once we raise the price, we're going to see what's going to happen with that.
Kevon Cheung: Got it. That relates to where you are at your journey, right? I guess later on in the journey. When I say filtering qualification, that bar should be raised a bit to protect your time and resources. Thank you. Wow, Chris, I learned so much from you today. Thank you so much for being here.
Chris Ngo: Well, thanks for having me. And I appreciate getting to talk to you in person. It's been wonderful. Just like you said, I'd love to talk more at some point. So thanks, Kevon.
Kevon Cheung: Thank you so much, Chris. I'll see you around.
Chris Ngo: You're welcome. Take care. I'll see you on next.
