How Nervous System Mastery Grew with Intentional Marketing, Content, and Community Strategies
Building a thriving Cohort-Based Course and community post-pandemic.
I first met Jonny Miller at Founder Summit, where he hosted a great workshop about nervous system regulation. I didn’t know his whole story then, but I got a sense from how he showed up that there was a deep intention and personal meaning behind his work.
That level of intention, I think, is a huge reason why within the last couple of years, at least in the corners of Twitter I hang out in, his Cohort-Based Course (CBC) has been everywhere. This course that involves feeling your feelings, using your breath, and getting vulnerable with strangers on Zoom, has gotten rave reviews, even from those who usually reserve their public comments for serious business.
This is especially impressive right now. Many of the businesses that center around a CBC as a signature offer have dealt with a decline in enrollment and are recalibrating their businesses for a post-pandemic, less Zoom-dependent world. Yet, Nervous System Mastery has grown with every cohort — they’re now headed into their third where they’ve gotten 615 applications for 250 spots — and developed a thriving alumni community.
In this post, we’ll explore what you can learn from what has worked for NSM in 3 categories that are key for CBCs: marketing, content, and community. If you’re teaching online in any capacity, there’s so much to learn from Jonny’s strategies.
Marketing
From the start, NSM was able to seamlessly merge selling and building out the curriculum. Here’s what helped the course grow.
Pre-sell with a screenshot
By the time you’ve set the date for your first beta cohort, you should be pretty confident that at least 2-3 people will be excited to show up. Jonny shared the first draft of the NSM outline months before the first cohort would start. Here’s that tweet:
I spent a slightly absurd amount of time today colouring in headings & adding emojis to various pages in my upcoming course outline + curriculum in @NotionHQ 🌈🤓 pic.twitter.com/kT9gFoLTtt
— Jonny Miller (@jonnym1ller) July 20, 2021
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In the replies, 2 people asked for the link to sign up. Jonny sent a link for them to put a $50 deposit and double their money back if the course wasn’t ready by October. They both signed up, and now he knew that if he built the course, at least 2 people (and very likely others) would be interested in joining.
Takeaway
If you have an idea for a course, share the idea with your people and make sure this first version is not super polished. Google Docs, screenshots, bare-bones checklists are a great way to get a read on whether people would actually be interested in the content you’re offering. Then, have a way for those who are interested to pay a deposit to save their seats. Once people make an investment, you’ve moved a step closer to validation.
Underpromise and overdeliver for your first students
One astounding stat Jonny shared with me about his current marketing efforts is that about 50% of new applicants for NSM come from referrals. This is a huge percentage!
This only happens when students have an amazing experience and are ready to tell others. As I mentioned above, the people I’ve heard talking about their experience with NSM, often aren’t used to sharing on the topic, but feel compelled to because of how much value they’ve gotten.
To optimize for word-of-mouth, it’s really important that the experience of your first students is great. This does not mean everything has to be perfect. It means that your students should feel your interest and passion both for what you’re teaching and for their journey in learning it. And they should feel like they’re joining a community that they have ownership of and are invested in growing.
Takeaway
Be very clear that your course is in beta and that their experience will be part of shaping it. This can also mean keeping the first cohort small, to ensure you can deeply get to know your first students and their journeys. And it could be an opportunity to offer the course at a lower rate that you increase over time as demand catches up.
Sponsor newsletters
I talk a lot about finding ways to market that feel natural. Once you’ve run a successful beta cohort, understand your members and their transformation you’re able to facilitate, and have made some money to invest on marketing, sponsoring newsletters your potential students read is a great way to grow.
Jonny mentions he’s spent $5400 on sponsoring 13 newsletters for the upcoming NSM cohort. Those ads have resulted in 250+ applications for the course. At $900 per seat, this is a huge return.
I think Jonny’s newsletter strategy has been so successful because he didn’t focus his sponsorships on newsletters that are necessarily in his “niche,” which would have been breathwork or meditation. Instead, he looked for where his ideal customers were, and sponsored newsletters they read. He targeted the people, not necessarily the niche. In his case it was stressed entrepreneurs, creators and coaches. That has made his message stand out.
Takeaway
Ask your first students about what they read. What is an identity you can tap into, that has nothing to do with the content you teach?
Content
The pandemic accelerated the evolution of online learning. Now that world is opening up again, there’s another big adjustment happening as online teachers re-adapt to a world where Zoom isn’t the only option for students.
Here are some of the tips from NSM around crafting your course content.
Meet your people where they are
Online courses usually have low completion rates and dwindling engagement for later modules. This is because students get busy, get bored, or skip lessons and then never catch up. One way NSM has addressed this is by delivering almost all content via audio feed. Audio removes many barriers for students.
They don’t have to be looking at a screen (which is something they may be trying to get away from).
They don’t have to be in a specific place. They can be on a walk, driving, on the train, cleaning the house, etc.
Jonny delivers all content via a private podcast feed hosted with Transistor.fm. Every week of the course, students get recommended lessons to listen to on their own time.
Takeaway
Design for where your students are. What parts of your content can you deliver in a way that makes it more likely for your students to engage? What wouldn’t feel like homework? Can you add audio to the way you deliver content?
Live sessions to practice
The magic of live teaching isn’t in the content, it’s in what the format allows for students to deeply internalize. A part of Jonny’s learning philosophy is that “knowledge is a rumour until it lives in the muscle.”
With that in mind, live sessions can be transformed into an opportunity to prioritize both practice and connection. Most of the content is shared through the pre-recorded audio and the weekly meetings are an opportunity to solidify and embody that learning.
Takeaway
Even if your course doesn’t require your students to literally embody their learnings, as NSM does, it’s worth thinking about the best way to use the synchronous time the group spends together. How can this time deepen the learning happening asynchronously?
Empower students to learn from and with each other
It’s hard to grow without burning out if learning can only happen when the teacher is in the room. When you’re building an online course, you’re really designing a system for learning. When the course is within a community, that system should leverage the students themselves as mirrors for each other’s learning.
In NSM’s live learning sessions, Jonny invites students to use the Feynman Technique to solidify what they’ve learned during the week.
The principle behind the Feynman technique is that only when you can explain something in simple terms, do you understand it well. Encouraging students to practice learning with each other not only helps them solidify the learnings, it also sparks new connections.
Takeaway
How can you incorporate peer learning into your course? Is there a structure you can add to your learning experience that invites students to recap what they’re learning?
Community
Cohort-based courses don’t work without the community. The accountability, camaraderie and connection of going through a learning journey with a group is a huge part of why people join. Here are some ideas from NSM on how to make community work.
Build psychological safety
No matter what your course topic is, building psychological safety into the space should be a top priority. In a cohort-based course, there are conversations between students that happen when you as the leader are not in the room (breakout rooms, DMs, etc). Because of that, establishing a culture of acceptance, with strict rules about what’s okay and not is key to people feeling comfortable and vulnerable enough to learn.
At NSM students are asked to agree to rules of confidentiality before they join the group. The rules are then modeled by Jonny, monitored by Ocean, their community manager, and reinforced by the mentors in the community. When new students enter, the norms of the community have already been set by others. This creates a space where people are willing to go deeper faster.
Takeaway
When you walk into a party and don’t know anyone, you feel a lot more comfortable if the hosts explains where to put your coat, where the bathroom is, what’s okay and what’s not. Take your students’ perspective as a new member seriously. Think about what your members need to hear as they enter your space in order to feel safe and comfortable participating.
Member-led events and small groups
The stickiest part of any community is usually the small groups. These are the structures that are in between the teacher-led big group experiences, and the 1:1 connections that start to form. They’re a place where people can start to be seen fully, but within the safety of just a small group.
At Nervous System Mastery, since previous cohorts are invited to stay in the Circle community, conversations have started in several niche topics that are related to the course. You can see their small groups listed here. They continue to be active even months after the last cohort.
Takeaway
When your community is ready, introducing small groups is a great way to build connection between members who have something in common. The groups that work best are formed around an identity or season of life vs. around a topic that lots of different people could be interested in. What are the sub-identities within your community that you can gather people around?
Take your power and spread it around
Building a learning community (which is what a CBC does) is about recognizing the power and trust you’ve been given and finding ways to give it away to members as quickly as possible. If you don’t actively do this, your students will look to only you for the answer, which can result in a pedestal culture where only your opinion matters. This is dangerous and does not foster learning and growth.
Jonny mentioned this (paraphrased) quote he learned from one his teachers: “a great teacher’s job is to point the direction and disappear around the corner.” A teacher’s job in this context is to create the structure for learning and to ask questions. The students themselves are responsible for learning.
NSM does this through the use of the Feynman technique mentioned, via a group of mentors that share their experience with the course and via Jonny’s intentional style of having more questions than strict answers.
Takeaway
If you’re feeling like building a course is too much pressure on you as a teacher, think of places where you might be able to share better questions, rather than great answers. Invest in your ability to build a structure that invites learning.
I believe that both teaching and building community is deeply personal. The more we understand our own experiences and how they shape what we care enough about to teach, the easier everything becomes.
Nervous System Mastery came about because Jonny lost someone close to him. It was in the aftermath of that tragedy and studying the self-regulation practices that could have prevented it, that he learned about his own nervous system as a way of dealing with grief.
Our experiences, painful and joyful, shape the work we gravitate towards. When we build community, we’re creating a microcosm of the world we want to live in. The deeper we lean into that vision, the easier everything else becomes.
PS. I asked Jonny about the ideal world he wants to live in, and how is NSM a step towards it and he sent me this his domino meme.
Speaking of ambition: inspired by @visakanv + @m_ashcroft + @p_millerd I made my own version of the 'change I want to see in the world' domino meme pic.twitter.com/5QEkqt9Yua
— Jonny Miller (@jonnym1ller) September 8, 2021
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I write about these spaces because I want to learn from them and also because I believe entrepreneurs who have a deep connection to what they teach and gather people around are the future of community businesses.
CBCs are one of 4 types of community businesses. If you want to check out other examples, here are the types with deep dive profiles on each:
Memberships — Dreamers & Doers and The Upside
Evergreen — Notion Mastery
Cohort-Based Course — this post!
Group Coaching — coming soon!