#leftover money if that happens will probably go to paying library fines or to another good cause lol

[themadcapmathematician]

Hey y'all, this isnt a pressing issue lol but i wanna play that Sally Face game, but my bank messed up and i haven't had a working credit card in a while, and throwing dollar bills at my computer screen isn't working out lol

If anyone's interested in sending me a copy on steam or $3 to buy the first chapter (or enough money to buy the whole game if ur in the mood) that'd be cool. I could doodle you a little something if you'd like ✌

Someone sent me some money and i bought the game, thanks everyone for rbing! If you wanna send me donations just cause (i could use a little extra cash just like anyone else) my paypal is birthdaycandles23@gmail.com. if you want to commission me, check out these posts and please dm me!

[rumbelleshowdown]

The Unfinished Story

Author: AshleySpinelli Prompt: books found under couch Group B

Detective Weaver of the Hyperion Heights Police Department was a man who filled the hours of the day with his work. Lots of work. He didn't do friends, he didn't have family, and work odd hours so getting a pet was right out. But he wasn't lonely, he had an important if unrewarding job that would have made maintaining human relationships outside of the office too difficult anyway.

All of this was contradictory to his near-manic search for one red-and-black book in his shitty little apartment.

Theoretically he didn't have to be in the office until much later in the day. His search wasn't due to any sort of police work whatsoever, though. Thank god. Because if it were he'd be making a hash of it. Taking a deep breath, Weaver stepped back from where he was making his second search of his bedroom. Okay. Why not approach it like a case then? A crime scene for a...a missing persons case?

Sure.

First: He'd had the book two nights ago, when he finished The Night Circus. The circus had been sold, the loose threads wrapped up neatly, the contest undecided between the star-crossed lovers. Good book. He had finished reading it on the sofa.

Second: Was anything unusual about that night? Yes and no. He had been a few words away from fully finishing the book, still reading the last sentence or so, when his phone rang and he was called in to investigate a new lead on a stalled case. Being called into work after going home wasn't too unusual, but that was when he forgot what happened to the book. He didn't get home again until the yesterday evening and had very blurry memories of shuffling into the kitchen and eating some leftover takeout, leaving his plate on the coffee table for the morning, and going to bed.

So, by this logic, Weaver had established where the book was last scene-the couch,-and when,-the night before last,-which meant his best bet was to look around the couch again. He backtracked to the living room section of his apartment, and briefly scanned the area with his eyes again. The coffee table was empty, the couch was clear, the one ugly little end table on the left-hand side was empty save a lamp and the TV remote.

Weaver's coffee table was enough to look under just by bending down a little, but the couch...aha. The couch was an ancient, antique monstrosity that could fold out into a bed. It was also so low to the ground he had to get on his hands and knees and reach up-

His fingers met with the corner of a paperback and Weaver grinned. He pulled out The Night Circus, a little dusty but otherwise in fine condition, and allowed the stupid grin to remain on his face while he wiped the book clean. Was he worried about late fees? Absolutely not. Was he worried what the librarian would think of him if he lost a book she'd recommended as a favorite and returned it in such a state?

Worryingly so.

The librarian, Gabrielle O'Hara, was a wee thing dressed in thick cardigans or sweaters, long skirts, and sensible shoes for climbing library ladders. She looked like the stereotypical frumpy librarian sans glasses, but her shy little smiles and clear blue eyes were the most beautiful things Weaver had seen. The first time he saw her was not love at first sight in the least; He'd only come into the library because it started pouring down rain in the middle of his walk, and the library was the closest place to dry out. Simple.

Things became less simple when he tried to explain why he kept going back. Ms. O'Hara was very quiet and skittish, but she was shy to everyone really. He figured taking up reading would get the higher-ups off his back, convince them he had a hobby even if reading was a bit dull by certain standards. He needed his extra money to pay for bills and the like, detectives weren't exactly loaded and he had an extra mouth to feed in his informant Tilly, so a library card seemed like a logical step towards a steady supply of books. At least that's what he'd convinced himself.

By now it was useless though: He had a ridiculous crush on the sweet, mousy librarian who had a truly wicked sense of humor if you got her to open up to you, and it was always on the tip of his tongue to ask her if she was doing anything after work on the Friday's he visited.

He didn't expect her to go to Roni's Bar with him or anything, the world's most platonic cup of coffee would fulfill his needs nicely. He just...liked Ms. O'Hara, seeing her was one of the highlights of his week. Seeing a little more of her would be nice, too. But Weaver was fifty-three, graying, and not getting any handsomer as time wore on, and spent too much time at work to really give a woman the attention she was due in a relationship.

He would be a truly terrible partner, and he wouldn't force that on someone as shy as Ms. O'Hara who'd probably only say yes to a date because she felt pressured. No. No way.

Still...he had to return The Night Circus now, and the middle of a Friday was guaranteed to be slow, so...

Weaver arrived at the library to find the circulation desk, decorated with a garland of orange-and-black, occupied by Ms. O'Hara herself, picking at a wilted-looking salad and reading the paper as was her habit at noon on a slow day. His steps on the floor drew her attention and he received a pleased little grin that had his foolish heart soaring.

"Hello Detective Weaver," she beamed, putting the lid back on her salad. "Did you enjoy the book?"

"You haven't led me astray yet. I admit the changing perspectives between the magicians and Bailey had me confused, but altogether, I enjoyed it. How was your week?"

"Not bad." And she always answered "not bad" to the point that Weaver suspected her life was as dull and repetitive as his was. "I'm expecting some new books in a few weeks, I might just have something very new to suggest soon..." she trailed off a moment as he handed her the book, squinting at the pages where her hand brushed against it. Weaver had cleaned the cover off, but he hadn't thought to dust the pages.

"Ah...I had a bit of trouble finding that this morning," he confessed slowly. "It fell down and got knocked under my couch."

"Ah," Ms. O'Hara bit back a smile. "I see. Well, it happens. You won't believe how many books I've found under the couch of my place, er, actually my shelf is a bit full so I've got books everywhere, actually."

"Because you don't have enough to read at work?" Weaver teased.

She blushed the sweetest shade of pink and pressed her full lips together. "Those books are mine, these books are the city's. There's a difference!"

Weaver heard himself laugh, and he was not a man who laughed often, but something about Gabrielle O'Hara made him very irrational. And stupid. That "what are you doing later?" cropped up on the tip of his tongue again before he could squash it. He was actively in the middle of a case, Victoria Belfrey was being extra pesky lately and he had no idea how he got involved with that woman but he really didn't like her. No, starting anything other than this casual friendship with Ms. O'Hara would be bad for her in a number of ways, in fact, it was time he left, probably.

"Well maybe you can explain the difference to me next week," he said as casually as possible. "I've got to get going."

Ms. O'Hara hesitated. "Aren't you going to check out another book?"

Damn. "Ah...I'm afraid I won't have time to finish it this week."

"Oh. Right. Well, good luck with...that. Be careful."

She had gotten in the habit of that. Be careful. Fuck. Did she worry about him? Weaver tried to shake that nagging thought off as he waved goodbye and left the library for the station. Did she care about him?These were answers he didn't want, things that would only lead him into more trouble if he really wanted to keep Gabrielle O'Hara out of his messy shit-stained life.

He'd do what he always did and focus on work. Tomorrow he'd bring Tilly some food and see if she had any new leads for him. She might be in an extra Tilly-ish mood tomorrow because it was Halloween, but, it's not like Halloween in Hyperion Heights had a great deal or surprises for a man like Weaver.

[sometimesiwritetoo]

Blood Money - Chapter 18

Chapters: 18/?

Pairing: Noctis/Prompto/Luna

Rating: M for violence

Warnings: None

Summary: Look closely. In the shadows, there is violence. Prompto was engineered to do one thing, and to do it well. Contract by contract, he shaped a world he could only observe. Touching lives only by ending them.

Check it out over on AO3!

Torture was not something Prompto had much experience in, but he was able to get by just fine in this instance.

Countess Lilah Tretch’s resolve started off strong. She was loyal to her friend, Duchess Ella, and had been taught basic techniques for enduring torture. Not to mention the fact that the longer she held out the more likely someone would realize she was taken when she failed to check in. Despite that she was still only a duchess. There was no way she’d hold out long enough.

One of the most basic torture methods Prompto knew involved tying a double ended metal skewer to her neck with one end right under her chin and the other end on her chest. It was a slow method that kept Lilah from dipping her chin down lest she sent an end through the fleshy underside of her chin or through her chest. He left her with her hands tied behind her chair for several hours while he helped Noctis and Luna clean up the bodies and hunker down for the next few days.

“Wow.” Noctis said as he rooted through the kitchen. “It’s been a while since I’ve had caviar. Can’t believe she had something like that all the way out here.”

Prompto was not surprised. Not only did she have caviar, but she also had different types all staked on top of one another in her cabinets. Next to them were crackers and several bottles of fine wine. He expected Noctis to pull them all out, but he closed the cabinet and moved onto the next.

“People like her cannot be parted from their luxuries.” Luna said. She collected blankets and laid them out in a thick stack on the floor of the living area. Next down were the pillows which she arranged at one end in a thick pile.

“What’s that for?” He asked.

“Sleeping. I’m not sleeping in any of her rooms, I don’t what she’s done in them.”

“This place has ten rooms!”

“And the rich have time to be creative.”

“What makes this space safe?”

“Because I decided it was.” She announced. “Noctis what are you making?”

“Fish egg and champagne cocktails.”

“You can have mine.”

“I’m kidding.” Noctis brought out some quail eggs, steak, and bread. “Breakfast for dinner!”

“Is there anything green in there?”

“No. And don’t look.”

Luna ignored him and found a bag of parsnips among several other fruits and vegetables. “We’ll have these with it.”

“We just stormed this place. We don’t need to eat healthy.”

“We don’t know how long we’ll be here. We have to ration everything.”

She and Noctis were back to “debating”, it was nice. Honestly he was wondering if this was a sign Luna was dealing with the situation better or if she was spiraling, but he didn’t know how he would tell the difference. Noctis clumsily crack the eggs on the side of a pan and dropped them in some hot oil. The yolks cracked and the oil spattered from such a high heat, but they came out edible. The steak got chopped up and Noctis cooked it until it was tough then failed to put any salt on it. Prompto did not say anything as he ate his plate. He’d eaten way worse food.

They finished and Prompto attempted to excuse himself. But Luna invited him to sleep with them under the blankets. He wanted to refuse, but if this kept everyone happy and calm then he could try to deal with it. He left his jacket and shoes on the nearby couch and got under the covers at the edge, expecting immediate silence after their long day. But that didn’t happen.

“Where is the Countess?” Luna asked. “I haven’t seen her.”

“In her room.”

“Locked up?”

“Yep.”

“But we didn’t feed her.”

“I know.”

Luna sighed. “We’re torturing her aren’t we?”

“I’m torturing her. You guys are just eating her food.”

“What did you need us for then?” Noctis asked.

“Aranea didn’t want you around in the city. Thought you guys would be better off out here.”

“So we’re hiding?”

“Yeah.”

“Great.” Noctis rolled over and stuck a pillow over his head to sleep.

“Are you gonna kill her?” Luna asked.

Prompto paused. “Maybe. Probably.”

She paused. “I can’t wait for all of this to be over.”

“Me too.”

Prompto did not sleep well. He hated sharing rooms, and beds moreso. When he was younger and more volatile he’d actually gotten into several midnight fights with a former roommate that the sisters let eventually end with a death. But this wasn’t The Compound, and it made everything go smoothly. He could deal with it for a few days. He wasn’t going to see them after the job was done anyways.

In the morning he checked in with the Countess. She hadn’t been able to wiggle her way loose or knock the pin away. She was sweating after the several hours spent strapped up in her evening dress. A sizable bloodstain had formed on her chest which seeped through the white of her clothes, but she kept her mouth firmly shut when he shut the door and approached.

“Any news on Duchess Ella?” He said casually. “Maybe a location?”

The Countess’ lips did not move.

“Well. I’ll leave you to think about it.”

He left, if it wasn’t the technique then it was the time that got people talking. There was some other things he could do if this didn’t work, and he knew he could always call Vincent, but he doubted it would come to that.

There wasn’t a television or most forms of entertainment in the house, but there was a library. Prompto found Luna and Noctis already inside browsing. Luna found a few Crystal Thrones books and had settled by a window to read them. Noctis still seemed to be looking for something interesting to read in the historical section. He took one of the Crystal Thrones books and settled in.

---

When the monthly payment didn’t come Aranea knew they were in trouble.

While there was some reserve money leftover from previous months there wasn’t nearly enough to bribe or secure resources for the unidentified amount of time they’d need it. She would’ve attempted to get in touch with Noctis, but Noctis wasn’t directly funding them and doing so might reveal their location to others. She’d need to find something else.

“What do we have that we can sell.” She muttered to herself. Both Biggs and Wedge were running through their recorded resources.

“Info on agents for Scarlet, treeline, Seekers of Truth, and A-line.” Biggs said.

“That’s all general information. And neither the Seekers of Truth or A-line are big players right now.”

“Security codes for the entire train line.” Wedge said.

“They’ll be updating those for the celebration.” So they were useless.

“We could do a few favors.” Biggs said.

“I don’t want to put our name out there like that. We’re vulnerable as it is.”

“But we could rent out a few specialized skills. Yuffie’s a decent torturer.”

“No.”

“We could see information Prompto gets from the Countess.” Wedge said.

“We could… But what if we need it. We can’t sell it to anyone who’ll use it against us.”

“We could just… sell her?”

“We could…”

“Brutus will always pay for that kind of information.” Biggs said.

“They’ll lowball us. We should sell to people who’d pay a premium for information.”

Wedge searched through known players. “silence might be best. They have funding from the Emperor’s political rival Jacob Spyre.”

“What’s his position?”

“He’s openly spoken against Aldercapt for at least a decade.” Wedge frowned. “But he’s known for his temper, and there’s no reason to believe that he’d be any less of a war monger.”

“Why does he oppose Aldercapt then?”

“Machismo. Arrogance? Narcissism? All three probably? He doesn’t have any political allies besides his sister who is currently out in the countryside. If we sold this to him it’s unlikely it’ll be all that beneficial. silence doesn’t have the resources to hunt down the Duchesses and keep a presence here.”

“But they could be holding their trump card.” She sighed, there was no easy answer to this. “Reach out to him. We’ll give him her location. If he accepts inform Prompto and he’ll handle the trade.”

“Okay.”

Aranea retreated to a room, to sit down and take a break from the people. Downstairs Cindy and Ignis were feeding Gladio’s gluttony since he was the only person around, who wasn’t Noctis, available to eat everything. Yuffie was sleeping and Claire was similarly troubled in the living room. It was usual stuff. They were a wet works team, working in a hostile environment was normal, but the delicacy of their operation was stressful. She did not envy the handlers who had to organize these large scale operations and juggle ten, twenty, sometimes thirty agents and ensure they had the resources they needed to get the job done.

Whether or not they were successful it would be a relief for the operation to be over and to return to The Organization. She could tell that everyone was feeling it.

An hour after the sunset Wedge came in to inform her that he would meet to exchange payment and information at one in the morning. She mentally began picking and choosing agents. Claire and Yuffie were not in optimal condition, and she’d need more than Cindy, who was not much of a melee combatant, if she wanted to cover her bases.

“Wake up Ignis and Gladio.” She told Wedge. “They’re coming with me.”

She got Cindy, who was up and ready quickly, and they both waited for Gladio and Ignis to come down. The two were clearly reluctant to wake up at such an odd time, but there was not much of a choice in the matter. Shit needed to get done.

“What are we doing?” Ignis asked immediately before they left.

“The prince’s funding has been cut off. We’re trading the Countess’ location for some money.”

“So the capitol noticed that he wasn’t doing what he promised to do.” Ignis sighed, “And now they’ve cut him off.”

“Dammit.” Gladio whined. “When we return I’m resigning.”

“This is all fascinating.” She deadpanned. “Come on.”

The meeting place was in an abandoned building in the red light district. Aranea did tend to enjoy the atmosphere of a typical red light district, but Niflheim’s capital was something else. No cops, but little foot traffic. In times of struggle the red light district always turned into a second battling ground. Meetings to exchange information rather than sex. Workers killed their john’s. John’s purchased information about other clients. A worker killed because they found out too much. And in the morning the bodies would be gone without anyone saying anything.

Silence agents were already at the meeting place when they arrived. Three agents. One man and two women. All armed with knives but no guns. Others potentially hiding outside, but Aranea couldn’t worry about that. Whether they had backup or not would not matter if she made sure everything went smoothly.

“Hello ma’am.” The redheaded woman said. Her face was perfectly neutral as she approached the center of the building. “Do you have the Countess?”

“Not with me.”

“Obviously.”

“Yes, I have her. I will give you the location when I have the money.”

“Our client would like us to confirm several things. Is the Countess harmed?”

“Minor injuries.” Aranea said carefully. Just enough to answer the question. No details.

“Does she know the location of the Duchess’.”

“I don’t know.”

“I see. What reason would you have to obtain her if not for that information?”

“Leverage.”

“Hmp.” The woman reached her hand out behind her. The man, tall and heavy set, placed a briefcase in her hand. “You will be paid in the local currency in the amount agreed upon.”

Aranea took the briefcase and began the labor of checking that it was accurate. She held one up to check the seal through a small stream of light coming through the window. It was authentic so she set it back in it’s case.

“She’s located in the Snowpeak mountains. Five miles north of the train station. My agents are with her.”

Aranea handed the suitcase to Gladio so they could head out. Cindy, who entered the building last, followed protocol and headed towards the door first. Aranea didn’t take two steps before realizing something had gone wrong. When she caught sight of Cindy struggling to open it she knew that they were in trouble.

A knife came sailing from the dark rafters towards Aranea’s chest. She caught it before it connected and immediately threw it back as hard as she could. Gladio dropped the money to summon his sword and Ignis just barely blocked the red headed woman.

There was no way of knowing how many there were and where they would be located. Even if they killed all of the ones in the building there could be others outside. Priorities shifted, get out and warn Prompto. She flanked the red headed woman and jammed a knife in her back. Ignis tossed one of his knives over her head to catch one of the men off guard. He crumpled to the floor as Ignis summoned his weapon back.

“Get the money and go!” She ordered. Cindy grabbed the suitcase of money and threw it through a window. The impact made a hole big enough for her and Ignis to dive through. Gladio charged the door, knocking it off its hinges and knocking out an agent on the other end.

“We have to split up.” She yelled before Gladio could get too far. He followed her and she lead him on a chase through the red light district. Down random alleys then cutting through the business district. They slowed down when they arrived downtown and waited for a bit at a twenty-four hour coffee shop before heading back.

Cindy and Ignis arrived before her both bruised and battered, but successful in bringing the money back safely. They’d already started on counting it and checking random bills to insure their accuracy.

“You two can go to bed if you want.” She said to Ignis and Gladio.

Gladio shrugged, his face looking very tired. “I don’t think I’ll sleep much right now. Did we at least get paid?”

Cindy shook her head. “Half of them are fake. We could go get the rest from them, Biggs was telling me that what was there was likely their entire group and he managed to get their faces by hacking into the cameras on the edge of the district.”

“Are they convincing?”

“Very.” She handed over a bill. “It passes all but one chemical test. We could potentially use it to purchase stuff, but they might have numbers they can track.”

“We’ll use them. Did Biggs call Prompto?”

“Yeah. He’s wrapping things up right now.”

---

“She’s going to be at the New Seasons event alone.” The Countess sobbed. “Th-The emperor didn’t want to risk it. Please let me go.”

“Who else knows she’ll be there?”

“Only Marina.”

Prompto was not entirely satisfied with that answer, but he was running out of time. If he had more resources he could move her to a more secure location and continue from there. But he didn’t have those resources. He took one last look at the Countess’ crumpled form. Her blood stained dress and dark rimmed eyes. She’d been awake for three days sitting in that chair. He’d cut her hamstrings on the second and did an intentionally haphazard job of stitching them back up. Torture always was an uncertain science. The victim could end up so messed up that their confession was meaningless. But there was no way to go back.

He untied her arms. They fell uselessly against her sides. She groaned in pain and relief. He let her have it for a moment before he plunged a knife through her neck.

He left her body in her bedroom and headed out. Noctis and Luna were waiting in the living area, both packed and ready to leave.

“So are we done?” Luna asked.

“Yep. We gotta go now.”

Aranea wired funds for him to purchase a snowmobile rather than risk the train. He drove it halfway there before they switched to the bus for the rest of the way. They were all mostly quiet and contemplative on the way back. There was no time for a real conversation.

Once they were all back at the safehouse Aranea briefed him on what happened while they were away and the new plan. With the event on a few days away they’d secured a brief itinerary of the event.

“Claire and Yuffie are both back on their feet. CIndy and I will just follow to make sure that they stick to the itinerary and they’ll make the kidnapping. I’ve got a cabin near the route set up for them. So you’re on standby until after that.”

That was fine with Prompto. He had a lot to think about.

---

Yuffie’s leg was still sore, but she had to ignore it.

She and Claire had been sitting in the same spot for a week. They watched the Duchess’ small procession traipse through the mountain trail towards the city. Got a feeling for the size and speed at which they moved, then located the return route and set up. Bombs on the mountaintops to induce a slide. Bombs located on the ground to slow the procession. They then camped out and kept their radio on. Aranea told them when the Duchess arrived, when she left, and gave hourly updates on her progress.

“Half a mile out.” She said over the radio. “We’re backing off now.”

Claire sighed. “This is it.”

They split up. Claire took the other half of the road and she snuffed out their fire. They waited and watched as the shielded, black car flanked by two snowmobiles churned through the thick snow. Yuffie thumbed the trigger. Watched them slowly make progress. She only had one shot.

When they passed the marked tree she breathed in, out, then pulled the trigger.

The explosion made the ground rock. The two flanking guards were launched from the bikes with such force that they died upon impact with the ground. Claire jumped from her hiding spot and rushed the car, using the gun on her blade to killed the driver and shoot out the locks. Yuffie ripped a door open and reached inside. Another guard sat between her and the Duchess, and he was already distracted trying to shoot Claire. Yuffie stabbed him through the back of his shooting shoulder and pulled his body out of the car.

Once Claire grabbed the Duchess she hit the second trigger. The explosion on the mountain tops was more a distraction than anything, but the snow rapidly began to fall down towards their position. Claire dragged the Duchess up towards the mountain opposite the explosion and they both just barely made it before the snow partially covered the attack. It was sloppy, but they didn’t have the resources for clean up.

“Let me go!” Duchess Ella screeched. She was panicked and repeatedly tried to tear herself from Claire’s firm grip. Yuffie breezed past the two and began the moderate trek up towards their remote safehouse.

They wouldn’t be safe forever at the location, but it was far from main roads and through a relatively difficult path. Claire jammed a sedative into Ella’s neck and ten minutes later they were making the journey towards the safehouse in complete silence.

Once inside they tied Duchess Ella up and waited until the drug wore off. It was a moderate dose, but it didn’t start wearing off until well past dark. She woke up slowly, until she could properly access what had happened, when her head snapped up and she began to struggle against the bindings.

“Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!” She chanted. “You don’t know what you idiots are doing! They’ll find me!”

Claire let her chant for a bit before silencing her by bashing her head against the wall. The Duchess began to sob instead, squealing and squirming.

“If you cooperate then you’ll be fine.” Claire said. She pulled out the phone Wedge provided. They had about ten minutes on it before they had to hang up and destroy the card inside.

She dialed the number Prompto had found in the Countess’ phonebook. It rang and rang and rang for a good minute before the click and a voice. “Hello?”

Claire put it up to her ear. “Hello Marina. We have your wife,” Marina let out a hitched breath over the phone, “We wanted to set up a meeting to discuss a trade.”

“Don’t do it Marina!” Ella sobbed.

“Shut up!” Claire snapped. “We’d like to meet at the Firelight lake tomorrow at midnight. Alone. Do that and we’ll return her safe and sound.”

“I don’t trust you!” Marina stammered. She sounded close to tears herself. “How do I know you’ll do what you say?”

“I don’t care if you believe. Be there or don’t.” Claire shut the phone off then crushed it under the heel of her boot. “Sit tight. You’ll be here for another twenty-four hours.”

With the threat made they had more waiting to do. Yuffie let Claire rest first and after that they traded off shifts. Duchess Ella continued to whimper and moan, making threats that she couldn’t personally keep. Yuffie shoved a sock in her mouth after an hour and from there they both tried to keep from going insane.

---

Prompto arrived at the Firelight Lake in the morning and spent the day keeping watch of the area. Few people came in and out in that time due to the heavy snowfall. He supposed that in the spring it was a nice place to be. He found torches and several benches circling the lake. Without the six inches of snow it might’ve been a romantic spot to be.

Unfortunately there wouldn’t be any romance that night. By three in the afternoon no one was at the lake. Prompto took several chances to make a lap around and check for hidden weapons or to see if someone had snuck up without him noticing. Thankfully he found nothing in his many scans. By ten he was confident that no one else was there.

Aranea and Cindy arrived at eleven. He gave them a walk around and showed where he’d be hiding then left them to organize and debate while he got into position. The woods that surrounded the lake were empty, and he was able to comfortably  watch as Duchess Marina’s car drove up. It was still for a moment before Marina opened the door and exited. No one else opened the door to follow.

Marina was armed. He could tell that she had a small gun in the lining of her fur coat and a knife in her boot. But he could also tell that she was too nervous to use them. It was placed incorrectly, creating a lump under her coat, and she kept patting at it nervously. Prompto didn’t bother to warn either Cindy or Aranea as he followed Marina up the path towards the meeting place.

His job was to more keep watched rather than listen in. If the deal went south they could handle it as long as there weren’t any surprises waiting for them on the outside.

His patrolling took him far from them where he couldn’t hear before circling back. When he got closer he could hear Marina’s urgency. Her almost wish for a fight, while Aranea was calm and didn’t give her anything to latch onto. Cold and businesslike. Debate the terms and keep responses brief. So while Marina dug for a reason to call it off and alert the emperor Aranea calmly answered questions with as little information as necessary.

Prompto headed back out again. It sounded like they would wrap things up quickly, but he didn’t want to rule out someone taking the chance to sneak up and interrupt right before the deal was confirmed.

The phone in his pocket rang. He panicked a bit as he fished it out, Yuffie and Claire were on radio silence unless there was an emergency, it clicked and the call connected.

“Ella’s dead.” Claire said. Her voice sounded almost painfully strained as she spoke. “We got jumped an hour ago and they killed her.”

“Who?”

“Couldn’t find out. We have suspicions. We’re going to regroup back in the city and discuss it.”

Claire hung up. Prompto chose to wait until the deal was settled and Marina left before he approached Aranea and Cindy. It looked like the deal itself had been settled, but it wasn’t fulfillable without a Duchess to trade.

“Ella’s dead.” He announced. “Claire called just ten minutes ago.”

Aranea closed her eyes and pinched at the bridge of her nose.

“Oh god damn it!” Cindy complained. She rested her forehead against a tree and let out a long whine.

“Where are Claire and Yuffie now?”

“Heading back to the safehouse.”

“Fuck. Let’s go. Sort this shit out.”

They all hurried back to the safehouse to regroup. Claire and Yuffie arrived with new injuries, Yuffie had a long cut down an arm and Claire had a giant bruise on her stomach. They got patched up by Cindy while they debriefed.

“There was about five of them. One took the Duchess’ head and after we killed three of them the last two immediately left.” Yuffie said.

“Sounds like they need proof she’s dead.”

“Probably. I was thinking it might’ve been the emperor himself.”

“I was too. He’s the only one who would benefit from it. Keeps Marina from talking. But were you tagged? How did they find you?”

“He has the resources to scout an area like that.” Wedge interrupted. “I don’t think we were tracked, I think he just has the money and manpower and search a mountain range for three people.”

“Then why didn’t he have them killed?” Aranea asked.

“Cause he can’t afford to lose more people? All he needed was the head, and with that he can lie to Marina to say that we’d already have killed her and that we didn’t hold up our end of the deal. He cuts off the most viable means of finding us by killing the one thing that would get Marina to talk. And therefore our only means of finding where he is. They didn’t need to kill Claire and Yuffie, and if they stuck around to try they might’ve all died. Especially since they both killed over half of their agents already.”

“Dammit.” Aranea was silent as she contemplated that information. “He has to come out eventually. He has to have projects that people are working on. He’s at war after all… Alright. We’re going to all split up and track down advisors and manufacturers. He’ll come out eventually to talk to them and when he does we’ll get him then.”

[littledonkeyburrito]

MY GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING POTATOES

1. When was the last time you ate something containing chocolate?  I had a couple of oreos earlier today

2. When in a car, where do you like to sit? You get a lot of choices when you’re the driver

3. Have you ever been lost in an unfamiliar setting? I have been lost in many countries. Thank god for Google’s offline maps

4. Are you the type that’s too ashamed to ask for or use directions? Thank god for Google’s offline maps

5. You overhear two people gossiping about you; what do you do? Nothing probably. I mean, what would they even have to say about me? I’m not interesting enough to talk about.

6. When you watch the news, how does it effect your mood? Either neutral or negative. That’s why I stopped watching/reading the news unless it’s an article I’m actually interested in.

7. Do you ever have anxiety attacks? Fortunately no. I had one panic attack when I was like 12 but I didn’t even realise it was a panic attack until many years later.

8. Have you been to the library in your city any time recently? I don’t even know where any libraries are in this city.

9. Would you ever wish to move to another country? Who, me? 

10. Have you ever had anything expensive stolen from you? MY GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING POTATOES. Look, this happened 3 years ago and I am still bitter about it. I don’t even care about the cash they stole from my wallet, I’m just angry they broke into my apartment and stole my potatoes.

11. What is your stance on getting revenge? Power stance for optimal stability

12. When was the last time you sent someone a friend request on Facebook? No idea

13. How do you decide whether to accept or not accept a friend request? Well, if I don’t know them I don’t accept.

14. Can you smell anything right now? No but you’ve reminded me that I have to put the trash out before I do.

15. Have you spoken to a relative on the phone today? Yeah I skyped mum this morning

16. Do you wear your hair up or down most often? I have short hair. But I do put the fringe up when it’s a bit shorter or when I’m going out.

17. What was the first thing you ate today? Leftovers

18. Do you have anything more important you should be doing right now? I gave up on trying to contact my internet company today. It can wait. Although I do also need to email my bank and ask about procedure for closing accounts.

19. Have you ever eaten tofu and if so, did you enjoy it? It’s fine. Certain types are freaking delicious but most is very mediocre.

20. Can you hear anything right now? Music on youtube

21. What was the last type of meat you ate? Beef

22. Have you taken any medication today? No

23. Have you ever been suspended from school? Yes, I was suspended once for fighting.

24. Have you ever inhaled helium? I have almost passed out from inhaling helium and, while it was a little bit fun, I don’t recommend it.

25. Have you bought something that was on sale today? No. Almost booked a first aid course but I’m going to wait.

26. Have you ever watched Parks and Recreation? Yeah

27. Have you watched a movie this week? No, I don’t think I have

28. Have you ever been to a wedding? I’ve been to a few family weddings. The first of my friends is getting married at the end of the year and I’m a groomsman. They couldn’t stand the thought of seeing me in a dress at their wedding so I’ll be on his side.

29. Do you keep magazines by your toilet? In the age of smartphones? No.

30. What did you last take a picture of with your camera? Food haha

31. The last time you got dressed up, where did you go? I have no idea

32. Is chapstick a necessity for you? If I haven’t drunk enough water or I’ve had salty food, yes.

33. What are you listening to? Estaré - DLD

34. Are you happy? sure, I’m content. I’m under the blankets in bed with the heater going, messaging with a friend. I’m going to London tomorrow and back to Australia and all my friends in 2 weeks.

35. What time is it? 8pm. I’m probably going to sleep soon.

36. Is there a high chance of you going out to the movies soon? I will watch movies with my mum when I’m back in aus.

37. Is anyone interested in you right now? I think my ex is getting kinda keen about me coming back to australia

38. Are you good at giving directions? Yeah because my mum hates bad directions so she taught me how to read a map as a kid so I could direct her when she was lost while driving.

39. Have you ever kissed in the rain? I don’t think so. I’m not big on pda so I haven’t kissed outside much.

40. How did you feel when you woke up? Surprisingly awake even thought it wasn’t even 9am. Now I’m tired af though.

41. Have you ever driven without a license? I learned to drive when I was a kid, so yeah. But not on roads, just property.

42. What color shirt are you wearing? It’s white with mickey mouses all over it. I got it at disneyland in hong kong a couple of years ago.

43. What are you most looking forward to tomorrow? Going to London, obviously.

44. Have you ever made out on a couch? Yes

45. What does your last message say? Goodnight patrick

46. As of this minute, what is going through your mind? All the crap I have to organise to move country again

47. When’s the next time you’ll be drinking? I’ll be in England tomorrow night so probably tomorrow night.

48. Captain Morgan or Smirnoff? Captain Morgan. I am not a vodka person.

49. Predict what will happen this weekend. I will be in London and it will be fun.

50. Have you ever been drunk at school or work? I’ve been drunk at the office but not while on duty. It was the christmas party.

51. Have you finished school yet? 6 years ago.

52. What was the last thing you complained about? Probably that it was cold.

53. What is your favorite kind of fruit juice? Fresh orange juice is good shit

54. Have you worn a necklace today? In all honesty I had kind of forgotten that necklaces exist because it’s been so long since I wore one.

55. Have you ever had an x-ray? Only on my teeth

56. Do you know anyone who was born overseas? Me, for a start.

57. Have you been to the movies lately? What movie did you see anyways? Last thing I saw at the cinemas was Coco. Still need to see Star Wars and Jumanji. And Paddington 2 but I’ll ave to wait until that’s on netflix.

58. Have you ever owned a golf-cart before? What color was it anyways? People OWN golf carts???

59. What is the color of the curtains in the room you’re in right now? White.

60. Have you ever done anything dangerous enough to have risked your life? Probably. Heavy drinking? Skiing without a helmet? Not wearing a seatbelt?

61. Do you get embarrassed when your parents talk about when you were a baby? No..?

62. Do you think anyone who is in the room with you right now is really mean? I’m alone. Whether that’s a yes or a no is up to your interpretation.

63. Do you get nervous easily? Yes

64. Do you get horny a lot? God, so much

65. Do you acknowledge your feelings or ignore them? Bottle, suppress, and ignore

66. What are you listening to at the moment? Branded - Nathan Sharp. I don’t really know who he is but he came up on the youtube mix and I kinda dig it.

67. Name all the pets you’ve ever had. Chablis (aka Shabby), Brie, Sparkle, Hob-nob.

68. Do you prefer being on time, or do you not mind being late? I'm always stressed if I’m running late.

69. What is one adventurous thing you’d be willing to do? I’m down for a lot of things.  70. Have you ever made a bucket list? No, I do what I want when I want. I don’t need a list 71. What subject at school did you absolutely hate? Physics, even though I liked both science and maths. 72. How many cell phones have you gone through up till now? In my life I have had 6 73. Italian food or Chinese food? Chinese, always. I think italian food is overrated. It’s not bad, just not as good as people say 74. Ever studied a foreign language? Spanish 75. Don’t you hate it when your family eats all the ice cream at home? I don’t live with my family and I also don’t eat much icecream 76. Favorite flavor of gum? I don’t like gum. 77. Do you tend to be frugal, or are you more comfortable spending money? That depends how much money I have. I am very good at saving money and talking myself out of buying things I want even when I do have the spare money for it. But then I’ll also pay a deposit on a month long trip on impulse. 78. Ever played a team sport, or are you not sporty at all? I didn’t do team sports, I did karate. 79. Do you put posters on your bedroom walls? Not since I was a teenager 80. Do you sleep with one leg sticking out of the covers? When it’s not the middle of winter

81. Has anyone ever told you that you’re a good singer? Yes and it surprised me because it is Known that I cannot sing well. 82. How many email accounts do you have? Two, I don’t use one of them. 83. Are you a big fan of dessert? I suppose so but I don’t eat that much dessert stuff. I more often have cravings for savoury food. 84. Biggest trouble you’ve ever gotten into at school? Probably when I got suspended. 85. Does it bother you when you see a 6th grader with a bunch of gadgets? I don’t give a shit. You do you little buddy 86. Favorite pair of shoes? My maroon converse that I just had to throw out because I finally had to call time of death after they walked over a thousand kilometers in 11 countries and were totally falling apart and had holes in them and a random pink stain on one of the toes which I do not know how it happened. It was in a club in Panama but I don’t know the actual source of the pink. 87. Jalapeños: yay or nay? Yay 88. Did you ever play Minecraft? No 89. Can you sleep soundly with the light on? Yes. Benefits of being a shift worker for years is that you learn to sleep whenever you get a chance. Also being a traveller has helped too because now I can even sleep on planes which is a goddamn miracle. 90. Would you like to go ziplining someday? I went in Boquete in Panama. It was pretty rad.

91. Have a Tumblr account? No 92. Do you have a lot of hair on your arms? Or none at all? Like, a normal amount..? 93. Often misplace things, or are you very organized? All of my things have a place. 94. Get along with your siblings (if you have any) well? Not really. But the older we get the less we fight. 95. Ever crushed on a teacher? If so, what subject did he/she teach? My spanish teacher. I was an adult though so it was less weird. Also one of my karate senseis when I was a young teen. 96. Ever been to the Vatican?  No, but I’m sure I’ll go there whenever I eventually it up Italy.

[eelgibbortech-blog]

How We Repeatedly Launch 6-Figure Courses With Just 2 People

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We just wrapped up sales for 10x Emails Mastery, a digital self-paced course on writing the most effective sales emails.

The course trains freelance and in-house copywriters, growth consultants, online coaches and digital product entrepreneurs on how to write emails that convert. W00t!

It’s probably the 10th product launch for Copy Hackers in the past 4 years (since we stopped selling ebooks)… and we’re now settling into a nice steady rhythm of about 3 course launches per year.

Keep in mind that not all our course launches involve selling brand new products.

No, we re-launch the same courses multiple times, which is really the key to steadily growing your info product business. After all, why would you put 500+ hours into conceiving, writing, recording, editing and marketing an awesome course if you only plan to sell it once? That’s just cray. Create once, launch many times.

Our last 6 launches have all been 6-figure launches, with our best-performing launch eclipsing mid 6-figures.

And I’m saying this with sincere humility: we execute these launches pretty flawlessly now.

The best part? We do it with just 2 people: Joanna and yours truly.

Yes, the courses offer huge value for buyers… and they’re priced right… and they’re marketed using the very same advice Joanna offers in the Copy Hackers courses. That said, a big part of maximizing course sales comes down to the set of tools we use to manage everything during a launch.

Choosing the right tools helps you earn more money. Getting it right lets you do more with fewer resources and headaches. The technology you use can actually feel like an additional team member – a team member that costs next to nothing. Mic drop.

It’s a great time to run an online business. But living in this age of digital products is also a double-edged sword:

The widespread availability of tools built to help you with critical aspects of your course launches comes with a hidden cost

The hidden cost?

The hard work required to select the right set of tools.

And there are sooo many tools.

You can experiment your way to finding the right combo – like we have over the past few years.

Or you can see yourself (and your course) reflected in this post… and consider our recommendations to help you get it right the first time.

Stop searching for the perfect SaaS tool

Based on my experience, searching for all-in-one solutions isn’t practical.

There really aren’t any all-in-one SaaS products for effectively managing every stage of your course launch. Trust me. I’ve looked. For years, I’ve looked.

What I’ve found is that you need a set of finely-tuned-for-the-task tools that will play nicely together.

There’s also no perfect tool for any given job.

My biggest learning about SaaS products (both in selecting them and in helping to create them) is that they always come with compromises. Always.

Accept that fact now and prosper.

Success comes down to finding tools that tick 70-80% of your must-haves, and then give you as many of your nice-to-haves as possible.

The products we use to support our course launches may have superior competitors. There may be cheaper options that deliver most of the same features we need. But we’ve battle tested this brawny set of SaaS technology and come out of some amazing launches with literally no logistical or customer service nightmares… which means we regularly get to celebrate success with no day-after-launch-completed hangovers (trust me, it’s a thing).

So here’s our list of favourite software that supports every Copy Hackers course launch. Further down in the post I’ll go into detail about how we use them, why we initially chose them, what needs improving and most importantly, why we continue to pay for them:

(Disclaimer: While we’ve never done any affiliate linking in the previous 150+ posts on Copy Hackers, we’re now affiliates for these go-to products. We believe strongly in them and we want to share in their success – by helping you be successful – and we’d love for you to support these products if you’re looking for alternatives.)

(Additional disclaimer: Just because we’re an affiliate doesn’t mean we think these tools are perfect. As you’ll see below, all of them require us to make some compromises.)

What follows is our process for continually nailing our course launches… and the tech stack we use to make it all happen.

STEP 1: Collect leads for the next course launch (Leadpages)

What we pay Leadpages: $40/month

It’s tough to sell a course without having a targeted list to notify during your launch.

When we launched our very first course, we notified our main Copy Hackers email list (and we still do this, to some extent). But it’s far more effective to build a segmented list of people who want to hear specifically about the next course launch. Hello conversions.

Here’s how we do it…

1) After we close the sales of any course – like we just did for 10x Emails Mastery – we redirect all leftover sales page traffic to an opt-in page, complete with countdown timer.

2) On our email-related posts on copyhackers.com, we point readers to the same opt-in page so they can be notified down the road.

3) As the next course launch approaches, we create more prominent ads in the sidebars on copyhackers.com… and point that traffic to the opt-in page as well.

Here it is:

This has been an effective strategy for building consistently awesome-performing launches. And setting it up is super simple with Leadpages…

Why we chose Leadpages for our course-launch tech stack 

Top of the list is the fact that Leadpages has always had a WordPress plugin – so we adopted early.

The Leadpages WordPress plugin lets us create opt-in pages using the Leadpages landing page builder and then publish them to copyhackers.com (i.e., so all our landing pages begin with http://copyhackers.com). Any changes we make to our landing pages in Leadpages are reflected immediately on copyhackers.com. Brilliant.

We’re well aware there are other landing page plugins for WordPress that we could purchase for a reasonable one-time fee (i.e., and not pay a monthly subscription), but we haven’t found anything quite as simple as Leadpages for creating and maintaining our opt-in pages.

Speaking of simplicity, we absolutely loved the idea of a landing page template library. There’s no faster way to create an opt-in page than looking through a template library, selecting a conversion-focused candidate and then customizing the copy for our purposes.

Leadpages offers some killer templates that are better designed for conversion than for pure aesthetics. We love great design, but we love getting conversions even more.

Copy Hackers is a big believer in teaching and training, and Leadpages has a similar philosophy. The template library and WordPress plugin are awesome features, but knowing how to get the most from them is key.

Leadpages offers a ton of options for learning how to get the most from their platform (and even if you don’t use their platform, there’s value in their content). There are free weekly live training events like “The Conversion Journey: 5 Steps to Generating More Leads and Sales“, teaching guides, courses, ebooks, case studies and even infographics:

(Important note for your own biz: The more your customers consume your brand’s educational content, the more brand loyalty they’ll feel.)

What needs improving

I haven’t talked about Leadpages’ landing page builder, mainly because we’re focused on creating simple opt-in pages that get the job done. We’d rather spend our time crafting the course sales page and email copy than labouring too long on the opt-in pages.

Thais said, one area where Leadpages was originally lacking was their page builder’s drag and drop functionality. As the primary user of Leadpages, Joanna was often frustrated by the lack of drag and drop options in the templates themselves. But over the past year or so we’ve seen a bunch of improvements there and we expect that trajectory to continue.

Why we stick with Leadpages for course launches

As you continue to read, you’ll notice a recurring theme with the tools we use and promote: reliability.

When it comes to our opt-in pages, every email address is valuable to us. Each one is an opportunity to help someone who needs our help – so these pages can’t have any downtime.

Reliability is solid with Leadpages.

And then there’s this more heartfelt reason…

During the beta period for Airstory, Joanna and I had the opportunity to chat with Leadpages cofounder Clay Collins about how he drove Leadpages’s growth in its early stages. He shared some stories with us and offered amazing advice based on what he saw in Airstory.

We may have been talking about Airstory in that conversation, but the point is this: a Leadpages co-founder was very generous with his time and even asked us for feedback about his product. Clay and his team are people who continually make us feel good about choosing Leadpages.

And finally, Leadpages continues to refine and improve their product. We can see clear evidence that they care about making our job easier, and that’s another reason we continue to pay them.

(SIDE NOTE: We have to add that we love the Unbounce landing page platform and their whole team, too. They’ve also been reliable, generous and wonderful. Unbounce is part of our tech stack — just not part of our tech stack for course launches.)

STEP 2: Host the course content (Teachable)

What we pay Teachable: $299/month

Our recent launch of 10x Emails Mastery was actually a bundle of 2 previously sold courses: 10x Emails (sold twice before) and 10x Launches (sold once before). To my earlier point about re-launching existing course content…

Copy Hackers courses are all structured similarly. That is, we don’t change what’s working. We offer a few handfuls of video lectures that average about 5 minutes in length – which are the core of each course – and the video lessons are accompanied by supporting materials such as checklists, cheatsheets, quizzes and, depending on the course, live workshops and Office Hours events. There’s a lot of meat on the bone:

Our courses are also self paced, versus forcing a specific lecture order on students / dripping out modules. There’s still a logical flow, but we allow students to move freely between lectures and modules.

And all our courses are “forever access.”

Why we chose Teachable as part of our course-launch tech stack

It was immediately obvious that Teachable understood our philosophy on create engaging courses… by allowing us to upload videos, PDFs, audio files, documents and presentation files. They get that different students like to learn in different ways.

We were able to tailor the look and feel of our school to the Copy Hackers brand and set up a subdomain at training.copyhackers.com.

All of the messages in the system were customizable: confirmation messages, error messages, button text, etc. This was important to us for creating a consistent brand voice across all stages of our sales funnel.

We could add students manually – one by one or in bulk. This would give us a lot of flexibility on the support side of things, because if someone was having trouble creating their account, we could step in and do it for them.

The course materials could be accessed from any device, and we knew that our students weren’t always going to be sitting at their desktop computers.

Teachable integrated with Stripe (for credit card processing), PayPal, ConvertKit and Zapier, so we could easily automate our launches and post purchase tasks.

We could also offer coupons for time-limited promotions and set up various pricing options in Teachable (one-time, payments, ongoing subscriptions).

The list of goodies continued… (And, to be fair, the list of goodies is equally strong with Thinkific.)

And there was the option to bundle individual courses into mega courses!

Teachable’s analytics allowed us to track student progress, so we could quickly see where students were getting stuck or dropping off in their learning:

We could also preview our courses as a student, eliminating the need to create “fake” accounts and continually log out and log back in to see what our students would see.

What needs improving

The built-in sale pages aren’t sufficiently flexible or attractive for us. This is the biggest reason that we use HostGator (see below) to host Joanna-designed sales pages. Of course “attractive” is very subjective, but Copy Hackers courses include lectures on landing page design as well copywriting, so we need our sales pages to look pretty stellar.

We’ve also had some gripes about the built-in checkout page design. But we were recently informed that the checkout page functionality has been greatly improved, and we’re encouraged by what we see.

Why we stick with Teachable for our course launches

We’ve discovered some cool things about Teachable along the way…

Quizzes go over really well with our students. And with Teachable quizzes, we can offer “completion badges” for anyone who scores 85% or higher across all the modules. Students love it!

On Teachable’s High Volume plan, there are no per-sale transaction fees and we get paid immediately via their custom payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal). So we keep more of what we sell. W00t!

The team listens to us. When the CEO of Teachable learned we weren’t making use of their sales or checkout pages, he responded to find out more and tasked his team to improve those features.

Additionally, our students haven’t experienced any downtime or reported slow video replay since we started using Teachable. This is huge and cannot be overstated.

Bottom line: The balance between what we get from Teachable and what we pay for it definitely swings in our favour.

STEP 3: Create a convincing sales page (HostGator)

What we pay HostGator: $16.95/month

HostGator? Really?

I know.

We’re in a bit of a unique situation… let me explain.

The Copy Hackers website is built on WordPress. We love WordPress. We also love WP Engine, the company that hosts all our WordPress installs (more on WP Engine in a future post).

Over the past 6 years, I’ve installed dozens of themes and 100s of plugins on our main and supporting websites. We’re actively running about 30 plugins right now on copyhackers.com. But what we’ve yet to find is a plugin (or theme) for creating amazing sales pages. We’ve tried a bunch and given up on them all.

Why?

They just don’t give us the flexibility we’re looking for. We’re pretty fussy about sales page design — again, we’re selling copywriting courses, so our sales pages are held to a very high standard (by Joanna and our visitors). Anything less than stellar isn’t acceptable.

The flip side of this issue is that Joanna has become very adept at building sales page “wireframes” using Photoshop. Back in the day, when she was doing contract work for clients, she’d deliver near-finished designs (much to their delight) because that’s how she’d ensure that nobody f’d around with her copy. ☀️

After investing even more time learning Photoshop over the past few years, she now has the skills to create build-ready designs for our sales pages.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Joanna is well aware that her ‘designs’ are in no way fancy. The folks at Reliable PSD, who build HTML from her PSDs, would agree.

Our current sales page launch process looks like this:

1) Joanna writes the copy and designs the page using Photoshop

2) She hands me a finished PSD for the completed sales page

3) I send the PSD to the incredible folks at Reliable PSD to be cut up and coded into HTML, CSS and JS files

4) I upload the files directly to HostGator and set up a unique URL for the page

5) I activate the URL just as we launch the course

Why we chose HostGator for our course-launch tech stack

I’ve used shared hosting services before. Primarily Bluehost. But in 2014 my youngest son wanted to develop a simple address book to learn PHP and he asked me about using HostGator. Why not, I figured.

Getting the account set up was really straightforward, and before long he was uploading and editing his files in pursuit of building the ultimate address book.

Given my pleasant first use experience, and based on what we actually needed to host (a single page) and for how long (a week or so), the stage was set to host our sales pages on HostGator’s servers.

What needs improving

Since we only use HostGator for the hosting (and not the dozens of additional features it offers), I only have a few minor quibbles related to its “cPanel.” That’s the control panel that most web hosting companies use, btw (initially launched 21 years ago!). So the niggles aren’t even really specific to HostGator.

Why we stick with HostGator for hosting our sales pages

In all honesty, these inexpensive hosting companies are selling a commoditized product – hence the very low prices. They tend to distinguish themselves with service rather than with product features.

Even still, I haven’t had to lean on HostGator’s support very often. It all just works. We have a dedicated IP address and an SSL certificate that bring the price up to nearly $20/month, but we’re okay with that.

We’ve yet to (knock on wood) experience an outage of any kind during a launch, during which time we drive 1000s of visitors to a single sales page. If we’d seen or heard about any issues along the way, we would’ve switched long ago.

Keep in mind that we have a rather special set of circumstances (i.e., our copywriter is also a webpage designer!), so I’m in no way suggesting that you should avoid using WordPress for your sales pages. Hardly. If you’re searching for a performance- and customer-focused host for your WordPress site, please do take a look at WP Engine or LiquidWeb.

The important thing here is that you spend time creating a sales page that can communicate all the goodness that you’ll deliver in your course�� in an easy-to-grasp and believable manner. Wherever you choose to host.

STEP 4: Market the course (ConvertKit)

What we pay ConvertKit: $379/month

Awesome copywriting course ready and waiting to be sold. ✔️

Sales page ready to persuade visitors. ✔️

Now we need to tell people about the course.

It’s time for an email marketing platform to join the party.

For a very long time – going back to our first subscriber to the Copy Hackers newsletter – we used MailChimp as our email marketing platform. It was our go-to to notify people of new blog posts and our ebook promotions. (FYI, those ebooks have been permanently replaced by our courses. You can get a copy of Book 1 here for free, though.)

When you’re starting from scratch, you don’t need a lot from your email tool. MailChimp had a good reputation and it was easy to figure out.

But then we began to notice it was missing some features we wanted. Like A/B testing of the body, which it didn’t have at the time… that, and its tiered pricing became a giant pain in the ass because we’d get pushed into a higher monthly charge the moment we crossed a new tier threshold by just 1 subscriber. And then there was the tragic few days where Joanna needed support from MailChimp and got very stock, not-at-all helpful responses. Given that we were paying $150+ per month at the time, we didn’t appreciate the lack of help.

We decided we’d gone far enough with MailChimp. We’d outgrown them. Hey, it happens.

But our decision to move was hampered by MailChimp’s sticking power. “Sticky” not because of any specific features, but because of all the stuff we’d set up in MailChimp over time – like tags and email campaigns.

We probably would’ve left MailChimp sooner had it not been for the anticipated aggravation behind changing providers. Talk about a high switching cost.

Why we chose ConvertKit for our tech stack

Unlike the other products mentioned in this post, we chose ConvertKit for reasons beyond the product itself.

I mean we didn’t ignore the product specs. Upon initial review, ConvertKit appeared to offer the features we felt we needed but were missing from MailChimp, like forms, tags, segments, sequences. It didn’t have A/B testing at ALL when we moved, which shows you just how ready we were to move. ConvertKit was missing some things, but it was still better than where we were. That might not sound like high praise. But if you’ve struggled with tech you’re paying for, you know how desirable “better than what we’ve got” really is.

The final decision came down to the people behind ConvertKit.

This says a lot about relationship building when it comes to selling.

There were 3 people-specific reasons that sealed the deal for ConvertKit:

1) Nathan Barry (CEO) was persistent in getting us to use ConvertKit. He followed up with us until we said we’d switch. And, while the switch was happening, he followed up more to make sure we stayed focused on getting things set up in ConvertKit. There are a lot of distractions in running online businesses, and savvy SaaS entrepreneurs know that distractions often get in the way of sales. So Nathan stayed on us.

2) Nathan also promised to assign us a migration specialist to take care of the dozens of small details that surround a move from one email marketing tool to another. We knew a migration would be a massive headache, and Nathan addressed our objection head on.

3) Nathan is about as publicly transparent as you can get with his company’s business metrics, and that carries a lot of weight with us. (Yep, those are ConvertKit’s actual revenue numbers.) Back when we started with ConvertKit, their revenue was closer to $50K monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and seeing him grow and expand the team has factored into our decision to stay with ConvertKit.

So with a migration specialist ready to go, we made the jump from MailChimp to ConvertKit.

There were a few bumps along the way, but the ConvertKit team made it happen. We ran both email marketing tools in tandem for a short period (ConvertKit did not charge us during that time) to ensure that everything was working as expected.

What needs improving

There’ve been times when ConvertKit’s strong growth has negatively impacted our ability to get timely support. During this last launch, we couldn’t schedule a downsell email to save our lives; this happened on a Sunday morning; we did not get the support we needed, and we couldn’t send the last-day-of-downsell sales email. That means ConvertKit cost us real money. Not good.

But that was an anomaly. We’ve sent 100s of sales emails without issue.

That, and they followed up with a handwritten apology. ❤️

When things didn’t go smashingly with ConvertKit, they apologized. How refreshing.

ConvertKit’s growth curve has also impacted their servers’ performance on several occasions.

Hitting the send button carries with it a certain expectation that the emails will be sent. 🤓  It’s so critical when course sales are closing soon and we need to remind recipients of a looming deadline. Deadlines are a very big deal with product launches.

Thankfully, ConvertKit’s growing pains are largely behind them (while they’re still continuing to grow).

ConvertKit needs to give us a way to archive email broadcasts and campaigns that we no longer care about, so we can more easily find the campaigns we do want to see. Right now we have 37 pages of email broadcasts to sift through. #nightmare

For the longest time there was no delivery data reported for each email broadcast, so we could only see open and clicks. ConvertKit now offers the full view.

There are plenty of opportunities to improve their dashboard reporting, too:

See all those vertically-stacked bars? Each section shows the number of subscribers for each opt-in form currently running on copyhackers.com. To see the numbers, you have to hover over each section. We’d much rather have a filter to see the data and growth for individual forms, because the aggregate view doesn’t tell us a whole lot.

And if we had our druthers, there’d be a way for us to compare growth over specific periods, like year over year or week over week.

Why we stick with ConvertKit

We love ConvertKit’s sequences… drip campaigns that allow us to space a series of emails out over time:

The time between emails is set per email. So when someone purchases a Copy Hackers course, we can send them a welcome email immediately, a reminder to start the course 3 days later and an offer to help 5 days after that. Set it and forget it.

But ConvertKit’s killer feature is its automation.

Automations are simple rules that ConvertKit follows… basically an “if this then that” engine:

When someone opts into a Leadpages form, we assign them a specific tag in ConvertKit.

When someone clicks a particular link in an email, we tag them accordingly (e.g., “Interested in copywriting courses”).

When someone completes a purchase in Teachable, we automatically put them into a drip sequence – and also tag them as a purchaser.

You can get really creative with automations by stringing multiple triggers together with multiple actions. It’s a playground for smart marketers.

Automations have greatly improved over the past year. The entire product has gotten stronger.

There’s always a risk in signing up for a newish SaaS tool that’s only been in existence for a year, but Nathan’s transparent product vision and ConvertKit’s pace of improvement have made us believers.

STEP 5: Answer questions from sales page visitors (Pure Chat)

What we pay Pure Chat: $25/month

So now the sales emails are ready for broadcast, but before we hit “send”, we need to make sure that our live chat tool is ready.

Adding live chat to our sales pages is probably the single biggest conversion optimization we’ve made for our course launches. I consider live chat a killer app and we’d never launch without it.

In fact, the sound of Pure Chat’s “Incoming Chat” chime triggers a Pavlovian response in me (I can’t speak for Joanna there). Nearly without exception, a chatting visitor is an engaged sales prospect… and something to get excited about.

Some people wonder if we’re “bots” and some are skeptical that it’s actually me or Joanna on the other end of the chat. But for the most part, we end up responding to questions that help close sales.

If you’re not already using live chat for your launches, start.

Why we chose Pure Chat for our course-launch tech stack

Like web hosting, it seems that live chat tools are becoming commoditized. And like web host pricing, live chat is very cheap relative to the potential payoff.

But cheap isn’t why we chose Pure Chat.

We chose Pure Chat because it looked simple to deploy and use. Its visual design is slightly retro and charming. There weren’t a lot of bells and whistles, and that was appealing. Remember, we’re only using it a few weeks (3 launches x 1 week per launch) out of the year.

We liked that Pure Chat handles multiple operators, makes it easy to set ourselves to available and lets us customize all the customer-facing messages and prompts. An email form is available to visitors when we’re not.

Simple.

There’s automatic scheduling and canned responses that we initially thought we’d use, but it turns out we rely exclusively the big “Available to Chat” button and we tailor all our responses.

What needs improving

It’s kinda nitpicky, but the “Close Chat” link is hidden behind an Actions menu. After I click that link, I then have to “x” out of the conversation to clear my chat window. And I have to do that every time. It turns out that many visitors don’t close the chat from their end, so we have to do it (or it’ll appear as though we have more active chats than we really do).

After all, speed matters when you’re chatting – especially when you’re keyboard challenged like I am. Sometimes Joanna and I will have 3 or 4 active chats going at once, and the product’s UI can either help or hinder our ability to keep the pace. Pure Chat mostly helps.

Why we stick with Pure Chat

Like what often happens with SaaS products you try, there’s a bunch of endearing stuff you discover after you dig in.

For us, one of those endearing qualities is seeing how many visits to the sales page each person has made, which is incredibly helpful to know when you’re in selling mode.  Early visit chats tend to be longer… involving reassurances about the content, the instructor and the guarantee… later visit chats are more rapid fire… where we get questions like “For how long do I have access?” and “How long will it take to complete everything?”

The more you know about your visitors – like how many times they visit the sales page – the better. A prospect on her 8th visit to the page is very warm. If you’d like, you can initiate a chat with her using Pure Chat. You don’t have to wait for her to ping you.

You can also see where a visitor is located, so it can be fun (time permitting) to fire up Google Translate and copy/paste salutations in that visitor’s native language. Or you can mention a recent trip to their country (only if it’s true). It’s great for engaging people who are considering spending $1000+ on your product.

In terms of working together as a team with Pure Chat, I can see how many chats Joanna has on the go and take that into account when I’m less busy. Balancing the load becomes easier.

Sometimes Joanna is in the middle of a chat and needs me to pitch a customized course plan or price (e.g., multiple licenses for the same company). With Pure Chat, she can immediately notify me that she’d like my assistance, and with one click I can join the conversation – and then hop out again if I need to.

Analytics such as average response times and chat satisfaction ratings are a bonus in Pure Chat – features that bring out the competitive nature in me and Joanna. We dig it:

STEP 6: Accept payments – wheeee! (SamCart)

What we pay SamCart: $199/month

Then there’s the money shot.

See those Join Now buttons below? They have to lead to some sort of payment page, and there are lots of such “cart pages” available.

For awhile we tried using simple Stripe payment forms that pop up in a clean, friendly way. But they’re a little too… clean. You can’t go into any detail about a guarantee. Or remind readers what’s included. Or show off your favourite customer testimonials. Those are the kinds of details and proof points that help close the sale in the critical final moments.

So we moved away from Stripe checkout forms. (BTW, we still use Stripe as our payment gateway on the backend. Just not their checkout forms.)

For our initial course launches – and back when we tried to use WordPress plugins for our sales pages – we relied on WooCommerce plugins to handle the entire cart and checkout process. It worked pretty well, but there were some downsides…

WooCommerce integrated nicely into our WordPress theme, but there weren’t many options to display social proof and other supporting copy on the checkout page. (So important.)

To make everything work, we needed WooCommerce plus WooCommerce Groups, WooCommerce Advanced Notifications, WooCommerce Stripe Gateway and WooCommerce Subscriptions. That’s a lot of Woo. It’s also a lot of stuff to keep updated… and sometimes updates didn’t always go to plan, requiring me to uninstall and reinstall everything.

In late 2016, after hearing me drop a few post reinstallation f-bombs, Joanna suggested that maybe we take a look at using a SaaS checkout solution, SamCart. She chose the right time to bring it up. I was definitely open to ideas at that point.

Why we chose SamCart for our course-launch tech stack

From the outset of my exploratory phase, it was clear that the SamCart team had done its research about its target market (= people like us!).

They offered a ton of checkout page templates to use as starting points – and we love templates!

The templates included all the things we teach about how to optimize checkout page copy for maximum conversions.

While Pure Chat’s UI looks a little dated, SamCart’s interface was clean and modern. Its simplicity (not to be mistaken for an absence of features) was certainly a big factor in our final decision.

In fact, the list of SamCart’s features was huge:

fully customizable messaging,

1-click upsells,

multiple payment and subscription options,

robust A/B testing (on pricing, copy, images… everything),

integrations with our favourite tools and refund and

dunning management — and so much more.

Dunning. A funny word. Not a funny thing.

We always offer one-time and monthly payment options for our courses. Monthly payments come with their challenges: on any given month, there are always a bunch of expiring cards and declined payments. Keeping track of these card issues and following up with customers is a real time sink, so the fact that SamCart automatically retries payments and notifies customers of issues was huge.

SamCart’s sandbox feature meant we could deploy and test any of our checkout pages with real credit cards, but without incurring real charges during our tests. Yay!

I loved the fact that you can control which fields are required on the forms, along with the length of guarantee we offer.

Product content, bullets and testimonials are all customizable. After about 20 minutes of configuration, we ended up with a checkout that looks like this (screenshot below is from our most recent launch):

Do these pages convert? Our one-time payment option (shown above) for 10x Emails Mastery converted at 35.19% – a number we’re very happy with and we’ll continue to optimize.

What needs improving

The sales and subscription receipts could use more customization options. Our European customers often request that we include their business info and VAT number and copy multiple people on the receipts. Right now this requires some time-consuming hacks. A big “Notes” field would do the trick.

SamCart’s reporting options are vast. But the date selectors are fussy when you want to choose a custom date range.

And of course, more template customization options would be welcome.

Why we stick with SamCart for our course launches

Support. Awesome support. SamCart uses Intercom (a SaaS product we love and use daily for Airstory) to manage customer communications, and it works so well. They appear to have a big support team with big hearts and plenty of knowledge about the product they’re supporting.

The product-y stuff…

If a customer tells us in a live chat that they want to purchase a multi-user license for a course, it takes me mere seconds to hop over to SamCart, duplicate an existing product, tweak the price and send the customer a link to purchase… right then and there.

If someone abandons our checkout page after having completed the email field, SamCart captures their contact information and creates a Prospects Report for us. This is perfect for sending a quick reminder for them to complete their purchase process or for reaching out to them to answer any remaining questions (remember, they were sooooo close to buying!).

On the last day of a launch and in the last sales email of the launch, we can link straight to our SamCart page. Just bypass the long-form sales page entirely. The prospect is very warm / hot at this point, so a shorter SamCart page moves them faster than a long page designed for low-awareness prospects.

SamCart integrates nicely with ConvertKit. I quickly discovered that we can manage the addition or removal of ConvertKit tags automatically – so we can tag new purchasers in ConvertKit and then suppress their emails from subsequent launch emails; conversely, if we refund someone’s purchase, they’ll be automatically removed from the list of course purchasers. This. Is. Huge.

These are the types of automations that really save us “thought energy.” Between the two of us, there are just so many things to remember. The less we have to think about, the smoother it all goes.

We haven’t even tapped into SamCart’s affiliate management yet. A little research indicates that we’ll be able to recruit affiliates to help sell Copy Hackers courses, and SamCart will handle the signup process, campaigns, commission structure and payouts… something we plan to explore for our next launch.

I think it’s fitting to end here on SamCart because if we were to choose one product in this list that we couldn’t do without now, it’d be SamCart. We love every product on this list, but for us, SamCart is indispensable.

Can we help?

If you have any questions about (1) how we execute our course launches or (2) how we use the tools above, Joanna and I are happy to respond below in the comments.

Here’s to your future successful course launches!

~Lance

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We just wrapped up sales for 10x Emails Mastery, a digital self-paced course on writing the most effective sales emails.

The course trains freelance and in-house copywriters, growth consultants, online coaches and digital product entrepreneurs on how to write emails that convert. W00t!

It’s probably the 10th product launch for Copy Hackers in the past 4 years (since we stopped selling ebooks)… and we’re now settling into a nice steady rhythm of about 3 course launches per year.

Keep in mind that not all our course launches involve selling brand new products.

No, we re-launch the same courses multiple times, which is really the key to steadily growing your info product business. After all, why would you put 500+ hours into conceiving, writing, recording, editing and marketing an awesome course if you only plan to sell it once? That’s just cray. Create once, launch many times.

Our last 6 launches have all been 6-figure launches, with our best-performing launch eclipsing mid 6-figures.

And I’m saying this with sincere humility: we execute these launches pretty flawlessly now.

The best part? We do it with just 2 people: Joanna and yours truly.

Yes, the courses offer huge value for buyers… and they’re priced right… and they’re marketed using the very same advice Joanna offers in the Copy Hackers courses. That said, a big part of maximizing course sales comes down to the set of tools we use to manage everything during a launch.

Choosing the right tools helps you earn more money. Getting it right lets you do more with fewer resources and headaches. The technology you use can actually feel like an additional team member – a team member that costs next to nothing. Mic drop.

It’s a great time to run an online business. But living in this age of digital products is also a double-edged sword:

The widespread availability of tools built to help you with critical aspects of your course launches comes with a hidden cost

The hidden cost?

The hard work required to select the right set of tools.

And there are sooo many tools.

You can experiment your way to finding the right combo – like we have over the past few years.

Or you can see yourself (and your course) reflected in this post… and consider our recommendations to help you get it right the first time.

Stop searching for the perfect SaaS tool

Based on my experience, searching for all-in-one solutions isn’t practical.

There really aren’t any all-in-one SaaS products for effectively managing every stage of your course launch. Trust me. I’ve looked. For years, I’ve looked.

What I’ve found is that you need a set of finely-tuned-for-the-task tools that will play nicely together.

There’s also no perfect tool for any given job.

My biggest learning about SaaS products (both in selecting them and in helping to create them) is that they always come with compromises. Always.

Accept that fact now and prosper.

Success comes down to finding tools that tick 70-80% of your must-haves, and then give you as many of your nice-to-haves as possible.

The products we use to support our course launches may have superior competitors. There may be cheaper options that deliver most of the same features we need. But we’ve battle tested this brawny set of SaaS technology and come out of some amazing launches with literally no logistical or customer service nightmares… which means we regularly get to celebrate success with no day-after-launch-completed hangovers (trust me, it’s a thing).

So here’s our list of favourite software that supports every Copy Hackers course launch. Further down in the post I’ll go into detail about how we use them, why we initially chose them, what needs improving and most importantly, why we continue to pay for them:

(Disclaimer: While we’ve never done any affiliate linking in the previous 150+ posts on Copy Hackers, we’re now affiliates for these go-to products. We believe strongly in them and we want to share in their success – by helping you be successful – and we’d love for you to support these products if you’re looking for alternatives.)

(Additional disclaimer: Just because we’re an affiliate doesn’t mean we think these tools are perfect. As you’ll see below, all of them require us to make some compromises.)

What follows is our process for continually nailing our course launches… and the tech stack we use to make it all happen.

STEP 1: Collect leads for the next course launch (Leadpages)

What we pay Leadpages: $40/month

It’s tough to sell a course without having a targeted list to notify during your launch.

When we launched our very first course, we notified our main Copy Hackers email list (and we still do this, to some extent). But it’s far more effective to build a segmented list of people who want to hear specifically about the next course launch. Hello conversions.

Here’s how we do it…

1) After we close the sales of any course – like we just did for 10x Emails Mastery – we redirect all leftover sales page traffic to an opt-in page, complete with countdown timer.

2) On our email-related posts on copyhackers.com, we point readers to the same opt-in page so they can be notified down the road.

3) As the next course launch approaches, we create more prominent ads in the sidebars on copyhackers.com… and point that traffic to the opt-in page as well.

Here it is:

This has been an effective strategy for building consistently awesome-performing launches. And setting it up is super simple with Leadpages…

Why we chose Leadpages for our course-launch tech stack 

Top of the list is the fact that Leadpages has always had a WordPress plugin – so we adopted early.

The Leadpages WordPress plugin lets us create opt-in pages using the Leadpages landing page builder and then publish them to copyhackers.com (i.e., so all our landing pages begin with http://copyhackers.com). Any changes we make to our landing pages in Leadpages are reflected immediately on copyhackers.com. Brilliant.

We’re well aware there are other landing page plugins for WordPress that we could purchase for a reasonable one-time fee (i.e., and not pay a monthly subscription), but we haven’t found anything quite as simple as Leadpages for creating and maintaining our opt-in pages.

Speaking of simplicity, we absolutely loved the idea of a landing page template library. There’s no faster way to create an opt-in page than looking through a template library, selecting a conversion-focused candidate and then customizing the copy for our purposes.

Leadpages offers some killer templates that are better designed for conversion than for pure aesthetics. We love great design, but we love getting conversions even more.

Copy Hackers is a big believer in teaching and training, and Leadpages has a similar philosophy. The template library and WordPress plugin are awesome features, but knowing how to get the most from them is key.

Leadpages offers a ton of options for learning how to get the most from their platform (and even if you don’t use their platform, there’s value in their content). There are free weekly live training events like “The Conversion Journey: 5 Steps to Generating More Leads and Sales“, teaching guides, courses, ebooks, case studies and even infographics:

(Important note for your own biz: The more your customers consume your brand’s educational content, the more brand loyalty they’ll feel.)

What needs improving

I haven’t talked about Leadpages’ landing page builder, mainly because we’re focused on creating simple opt-in pages that get the job done. We’d rather spend our time crafting the course sales page and email copy than labouring too long on the opt-in pages.

Thais said, one area where Leadpages was originally lacking was their page builder’s drag and drop functionality. As the primary user of Leadpages, Joanna was often frustrated by the lack of drag and drop options in the templates themselves. But over the past year or so we’ve seen a bunch of improvements there and we expect that trajectory to continue.

Why we stick with Leadpages for course launches

As you continue to read, you’ll notice a recurring theme with the tools we use and promote: reliability.

When it comes to our opt-in pages, every email address is valuable to us. Each one is an opportunity to help someone who needs our help – so these pages can’t have any downtime.

Reliability is solid with Leadpages.

And then there’s this more heartfelt reason…

During the beta period for Airstory, Joanna and I had the opportunity to chat with Leadpages cofounder Clay Collins about how he drove Leadpages’s growth in its early stages. He shared some stories with us and offered amazing advice based on what he saw in Airstory.

We may have been talking about Airstory in that conversation, but the point is this: a Leadpages co-founder was very generous with his time and even asked us for feedback about his product. Clay and his team are people who continually make us feel good about choosing Leadpages.

And finally, Leadpages continues to refine and improve their product. We can see clear evidence that they care about making our job easier, and that’s another reason we continue to pay them.

(SIDE NOTE: We have to add that we love the Unbounce landing page platform and their whole team, too. They’ve also been reliable, generous and wonderful. Unbounce is part of our tech stack — just not part of our tech stack for course launches.)

STEP 2: Host the course content (Teachable)

What we pay Teachable: $299/month

Our recent launch of 10x Emails Mastery was actually a bundle of 2 previously sold courses: 10x Emails (sold twice before) and 10x Launches (sold once before). To my earlier point about re-launching existing course content…

Copy Hackers courses are all structured similarly. That is, we don’t change what’s working. We offer a few handfuls of video lectures that average about 5 minutes in length – which are the core of each course – and the video lessons are accompanied by supporting materials such as checklists, cheatsheets, quizzes and, depending on the course, live workshops and Office Hours events. There’s a lot of meat on the bone:

Our courses are also self paced, versus forcing a specific lecture order on students / dripping out modules. There’s still a logical flow, but we allow students to move freely between lectures and modules.

And all our courses are “forever access.”

Why we chose Teachable as part of our course-launch tech stack

It was immediately obvious that Teachable understood our philosophy on create engaging courses… by allowing us to upload videos, PDFs, audio files, documents and presentation files. They get that different students like to learn in different ways.

We were able to tailor the look and feel of our school to the Copy Hackers brand and set up a subdomain at training.copyhackers.com.

All of the messages in the system were customizable: confirmation messages, error messages, button text, etc. This was important to us for creating a consistent brand voice across all stages of our sales funnel.

We could add students manually – one by one or in bulk. This would give us a lot of flexibility on the support side of things, because if someone was having trouble creating their account, we could step in and do it for them.

The course materials could be accessed from any device, and we knew that our students weren’t always going to be sitting at their desktop computers.

Teachable integrated with Stripe (for credit card processing), PayPal, ConvertKit and Zapier, so we could easily automate our launches and post purchase tasks.

We could also offer coupons for time-limited promotions and set up various pricing options in Teachable (one-time, payments, ongoing subscriptions).

The list of goodies continued… (And, to be fair, the list of goodies is equally strong with Thinkific.)

And there was the option to bundle individual courses into mega courses!

Teachable’s analytics allowed us to track student progress, so we could quickly see where students were getting stuck or dropping off in their learning:

We could also preview our courses as a student, eliminating the need to create “fake” accounts and continually log out and log back in to see what our students would see.

What needs improving

The built-in sale pages aren’t sufficiently flexible or attractive for us. This is the biggest reason that we use HostGator (see below) to host Joanna-designed sales pages. Of course “attractive” is very subjective, but Copy Hackers courses include lectures on landing page design as well copywriting, so we need our sales pages to look pretty stellar.

We’ve also had some gripes about the built-in checkout page design. But we were recently informed that the checkout page functionality has been greatly improved, and we’re encouraged by what we see.

Why we stick with Teachable for our course launches

We’ve discovered some cool things about Teachable along the way…

Quizzes go over really well with our students. And with Teachable quizzes, we can offer “completion badges” for anyone who scores 85% or higher across all the modules. Students love it!

On Teachable’s High Volume plan, there are no per-sale transaction fees and we get paid immediately via their custom payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal). So we keep more of what we sell. W00t!

The team listens to us. When the CEO of Teachable learned we weren’t making use of their sales or checkout pages, he responded to find out more and tasked his team to improve those features.

Additionally, our students haven’t experienced any downtime or reported slow video replay since we started using Teachable. This is huge and cannot be overstated.

Bottom line: The balance between what we get from Teachable and what we pay for it definitely swings in our favour.

STEP 3: Create a convincing sales page (HostGator)

What we pay HostGator: $16.95/month

HostGator? Really?

I know.

We’re in a bit of a unique situation… let me explain.

The Copy Hackers website is built on WordPress. We love WordPress. We also love WP Engine, the company that hosts all our WordPress installs (more on WP Engine in a future post).

Over the past 6 years, I’ve installed dozens of themes and 100s of plugins on our main and supporting websites. We’re actively running about 30 plugins right now on copyhackers.com. But what we’ve yet to find is a plugin (or theme) for creating amazing sales pages. We’ve tried a bunch and given up on them all.

Why?

They just don’t give us the flexibility we’re looking for. We’re pretty fussy about sales page design — again, we’re selling copywriting courses, so our sales pages are held to a very high standard (by Joanna and our visitors). Anything less than stellar isn’t acceptable.

The flip side of this issue is that Joanna has become very adept at building sales page “wireframes” using Photoshop. Back in the day, when she was doing contract work for clients, she’d deliver near-finished designs (much to their delight) because that’s how she’d ensure that nobody f’d around with her copy. ☀️

After investing even more time learning Photoshop over the past few years, she now has the skills to create build-ready designs for our sales pages.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Joanna is well aware that her ‘designs’ are in no way fancy. The folks at Reliable PSD, who build HTML from her PSDs, would agree.

Our current sales page launch process looks like this:

1) Joanna writes the copy and designs the page using Photoshop

2) She hands me a finished PSD for the completed sales page

3) I send the PSD to the incredible folks at Reliable PSD to be cut up and coded into HTML, CSS and JS files

4) I upload the files directly to HostGator and set up a unique URL for the page

5) I activate the URL just as we launch the course

Why we chose HostGator for our course-launch tech stack

I’ve used shared hosting services before. Primarily Bluehost. But in 2014 my youngest son wanted to develop a simple address book to learn PHP and he asked me about using HostGator. Why not, I figured.

Getting the account set up was really straightforward, and before long he was uploading and editing his files in pursuit of building the ultimate address book.

Given my pleasant first use experience, and based on what we actually needed to host (a single page) and for how long (a week or so), the stage was set to host our sales pages on HostGator’s servers.

What needs improving

Since we only use HostGator for the hosting (and not the dozens of additional features it offers), I only have a few minor quibbles related to its “cPanel.” That’s the control panel that most web hosting companies use, btw (initially launched 21 years ago!). So the niggles aren’t even really specific to HostGator.

Why we stick with HostGator for hosting our sales pages

In all honesty, these inexpensive hosting companies are selling a commoditized product – hence the very low prices. They tend to distinguish themselves with service rather than with product features.

Even still, I haven’t had to lean on HostGator’s support very often. It all just works. We have a dedicated IP address and an SSL certificate that bring the price up to nearly $20/month, but we’re okay with that.

We’ve yet to (knock on wood) experience an outage of any kind during a launch, during which time we drive 1000s of visitors to a single sales page. If we’d seen or heard about any issues along the way, we would’ve switched long ago.

Keep in mind that we have a rather special set of circumstances (i.e., our copywriter is also a webpage designer!), so I’m in no way suggesting that you should avoid using WordPress for your sales pages. Hardly. If you’re searching for a performance- and customer-focused host for your WordPress site, please do take a look at WP Engine or LiquidWeb.

The important thing here is that you spend time creating a sales page that can communicate all the goodness that you’ll deliver in your course… in an easy-to-grasp and believable manner. Wherever you choose to host.

STEP 4: Market the course (ConvertKit)

What we pay ConvertKit: $379/month

Awesome copywriting course ready and waiting to be sold. ✔️

Sales page ready to persuade visitors. ✔️

Now we need to tell people about the course.

It’s time for an email marketing platform to join the party.

For a very long time – going back to our first subscriber to the Copy Hackers newsletter – we used MailChimp as our email marketing platform. It was our go-to to notify people of new blog posts and our ebook promotions. (FYI, those ebooks have been permanently replaced by our courses. You can get a copy of Book 1 here for free, though.)

When you’re starting from scratch, you don’t need a lot from your email tool. MailChimp had a good reputation and it was easy to figure out.

But then we began to notice it was missing some features we wanted. Like A/B testing of the body, which it didn’t have at the time… that, and its tiered pricing became a giant pain in the ass because we’d get pushed into a higher monthly charge the moment we crossed a new tier threshold by just 1 subscriber. And then there was the tragic few days where Joanna needed support from MailChimp and got very stock, not-at-all helpful responses. Given that we were paying $150+ per month at the time, we didn’t appreciate the lack of help.

We decided we’d gone far enough with MailChimp. We’d outgrown them. Hey, it happens.

But our decision to move was hampered by MailChimp’s sticking power. “Sticky” not because of any specific features, but because of all the stuff we’d set up in MailChimp over time – like tags and email campaigns.

We probably would’ve left MailChimp sooner had it not been for the anticipated aggravation behind changing providers. Talk about a high switching cost.

Why we chose ConvertKit for our tech stack

Unlike the other products mentioned in this post, we chose ConvertKit for reasons beyond the product itself.

I mean we didn’t ignore the product specs. Upon initial review, ConvertKit appeared to offer the features we felt we needed but were missing from MailChimp, like forms, tags, segments, sequences. It didn’t have A/B testing at ALL when we moved, which shows you just how ready we were to move. ConvertKit was missing some things, but it was still better than where we were. That might not sound like high praise. But if you’ve struggled with tech you’re paying for, you know how desirable “better than what we’ve got” really is.

The final decision came down to the people behind ConvertKit.

This says a lot about relationship building when it comes to selling.

There were 3 people-specific reasons that sealed the deal for ConvertKit:

1) Nathan Barry (CEO) was persistent in getting us to use ConvertKit. He followed up with us until we said we’d switch. And, while the switch was happening, he followed up more to make sure we stayed focused on getting things set up in ConvertKit. There are a lot of distractions in running online businesses, and savvy SaaS entrepreneurs know that distractions often get in the way of sales. So Nathan stayed on us.

2) Nathan also promised to assign us a migration specialist to take care of the dozens of small details that surround a move from one email marketing tool to another. We knew a migration would be a massive headache, and Nathan addressed our objection head on.

3) Nathan is about as publicly transparent as you can get with his company’s business metrics, and that carries a lot of weight with us. (Yep, those are ConvertKit’s actual revenue numbers.) Back when we started with ConvertKit, their revenue was closer to $50K monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and seeing him grow and expand the team has factored into our decision to stay with ConvertKit.

So with a migration specialist ready to go, we made the jump from MailChimp to ConvertKit.

There were a few bumps along the way, but the ConvertKit team made it happen. We ran both email marketing tools in tandem for a short period (ConvertKit did not charge us during that time) to ensure that everything was working as expected.

What needs improving

There’ve been times when ConvertKit’s strong growth has negatively impacted our ability to get timely support. During this last launch, we couldn’t schedule a downsell email to save our lives; this happened on a Sunday morning; we did not get the support we needed, and we couldn’t send the last-day-of-downsell sales email. That means ConvertKit cost us real money. Not good.

But that was an anomaly. We’ve sent 100s of sales emails without issue.

That, and they followed up with a handwritten apology. ❤️

When things didn’t go smashingly with ConvertKit, they apologized. How refreshing.

ConvertKit’s growth curve has also impacted their servers’ performance on several occasions.

Hitting the send button carries with it a certain expectation that the emails will be sent. 🤓  It’s so critical when course sales are closing soon and we need to remind recipients of a looming deadline. Deadlines are a very big deal with product launches.

Thankfully, ConvertKit’s growing pains are largely behind them (while they’re still continuing to grow).

ConvertKit needs to give us a way to archive email broadcasts and campaigns that we no longer care about, so we can more easily find the campaigns we do want to see. Right now we have 37 pages of email broadcasts to sift through. #nightmare

For the longest time there was no delivery data reported for each email broadcast, so we could only see open and clicks. ConvertKit now offers the full view.

There are plenty of opportunities to improve their dashboard reporting, too:

See all those vertically-stacked bars? Each section shows the number of subscribers for each opt-in form currently running on copyhackers.com. To see the numbers, you have to hover over each section. We’d much rather have a filter to see the data and growth for individual forms, because the aggregate view doesn’t tell us a whole lot.

And if we had our druthers, there’d be a way for us to compare growth over specific periods, like year over year or week over week.

Why we stick with ConvertKit

We love ConvertKit’s sequences… drip campaigns that allow us to space a series of emails out over time:

The time between emails is set per email. So when someone purchases a Copy Hackers course, we can send them a welcome email immediately, a reminder to start the course 3 days later and an offer to help 5 days after that. Set it and forget it.

But ConvertKit’s killer feature is its automation.

Automations are simple rules that ConvertKit follows… basically an “if this then that” engine:

When someone opts into a Leadpages form, we assign them a specific tag in ConvertKit.

When someone clicks a particular link in an email, we tag them accordingly (e.g., “Interested in copywriting courses”).

When someone completes a purchase in Teachable, we automatically put them into a drip sequence – and also tag them as a purchaser.

You can get really creative with automations by stringing multiple triggers together with multiple actions. It’s a playground for smart marketers.

Automations have greatly improved over the past year. The entire product has gotten stronger.

There’s always a risk in signing up for a newish SaaS tool that��s only been in existence for a year, but Nathan’s transparent product vision and ConvertKit’s pace of improvement have made us believers.

STEP 5: Answer questions from sales page visitors (Pure Chat)

What we pay Pure Chat: $25/month

So now the sales emails are ready for broadcast, but before we hit “send”, we need to make sure that our live chat tool is ready.

Adding live chat to our sales pages is probably the single biggest conversion optimization we’ve made for our course launches. I consider live chat a killer app and we’d never launch without it.

In fact, the sound of Pure Chat’s “Incoming Chat” chime triggers a Pavlovian response in me (I can’t speak for Joanna there). Nearly without exception, a chatting visitor is an engaged sales prospect… and something to get excited about.

Some people wonder if we’re “bots” and some are skeptical that it’s actually me or Joanna on the other end of the chat. But for the most part, we end up responding to questions that help close sales.

If you’re not already using live chat for your launches, start.

Why we chose Pure Chat for our course-launch tech stack

Like web hosting, it seems that live chat tools are becoming commoditized. And like web host pricing, live chat is very cheap relative to the potential payoff.

But cheap isn’t why we chose Pure Chat.

We chose Pure Chat because it looked simple to deploy and use. Its visual design is slightly retro and charming. There weren’t a lot of bells and whistles, and that was appealing. Remember, we’re only using it a few weeks (3 launches x 1 week per launch) out of the year.

We liked that Pure Chat handles multiple operators, makes it easy to set ourselves to available and lets us customize all the customer-facing messages and prompts. An email form is available to visitors when we’re not.

Simple.

There’s automatic scheduling and canned responses that we initially thought we’d use, but it turns out we rely exclusively the big “Available to Chat” button and we tailor all our responses.

What needs improving

It’s kinda nitpicky, but the “Close Chat” link is hidden behind an Actions menu. After I click that link, I then have to “x” out of the conversation to clear my chat window. And I have to do that every time. It turns out that many visitors don’t close the chat from their end, so we have to do it (or it’ll appear as though we have more active chats than we really do).

After all, speed matters when you’re chatting – especially when you’re keyboard challenged like I am. Sometimes Joanna and I will have 3 or 4 active chats going at once, and the product’s UI can either help or hinder our ability to keep the pace. Pure Chat mostly helps.

Why we stick with Pure Chat

Like what often happens with SaaS products you try, there’s a bunch of endearing stuff you discover after you dig in.

For us, one of those endearing qualities is seeing how many visits to the sales page each person has made, which is incredibly helpful to know when you’re in selling mode.  Early visit chats tend to be longer… involving reassurances about the content, the instructor and the guarantee… later visit chats are more rapid fire… where we get questions like “For how long do I have access?” and “How long will it take to complete everything?”

The more you know about your visitors – like how many times they visit the sales page – the better. A prospect on her 8th visit to the page is very warm. If you’d like, you can initiate a chat with her using Pure Chat. You don’t have to wait for her to ping you.

You can also see where a visitor is located, so it can be fun (time permitting) to fire up Google Translate and copy/paste salutations in that visitor’s native language. Or you can mention a recent trip to their country (only if it’s true). It’s great for engaging people who are considering spending $1000+ on your product.

In terms of working together as a team with Pure Chat, I can see how many chats Joanna has on the go and take that into account when I’m less busy. Balancing the load becomes easier.

Sometimes Joanna is in the middle of a chat and needs me to pitch a customized course plan or price (e.g., multiple licenses for the same company). With Pure Chat, she can immediately notify me that she’d like my assistance, and with one click I can join the conversation – and then hop out again if I need to.

Analytics such as average response times and chat satisfaction ratings are a bonus in Pure Chat – features that bring out the competitive nature in me and Joanna. We dig it:

STEP 6: Accept payments – wheeee! (SamCart)

What we pay SamCart: $199/month

Then there’s the money shot.

See those Join Now buttons below? They have to lead to some sort of payment page, and there are lots of such “cart pages” available.

For awhile we tried using simple Stripe payment forms that pop up in a clean, friendly way. But they’re a little too… clean. You can’t go into any detail about a guarantee. Or remind readers what’s included. Or show off your favourite customer testimonials. Those are the kinds of details and proof points that help close the sale in the critical final moments.

So we moved away from Stripe checkout forms. (BTW, we still use Stripe as our payment gateway on the backend. Just not their checkout forms.)

For our initial course launches – and back when we tried to use WordPress plugins for our sales pages – we relied on WooCommerce plugins to handle the entire cart and checkout process. It worked pretty well, but there were some downsides…

WooCommerce integrated nicely into our WordPress theme, but there weren’t many options to display social proof and other supporting copy on the checkout page. (So important.)

To make everything work, we needed WooCommerce plus WooCommerce Groups, WooCommerce Advanced Notifications, WooCommerce Stripe Gateway and WooCommerce Subscriptions. That’s a lot of Woo. It’s also a lot of stuff to keep updated… and sometimes updates didn’t always go to plan, requiring me to uninstall and reinstall everything.

In late 2016, after hearing me drop a few post reinstallation f-bombs, Joanna suggested that maybe we take a look at using a SaaS checkout solution, SamCart. She chose the right time to bring it up. I was definitely open to ideas at that point.

Why we chose SamCart for our course-launch tech stack

From the outset of my exploratory phase, it was clear that the SamCart team had done its research about its target market (= people like us!).

They offered a ton of checkout page templates to use as starting points – and we love templates!

The templates included all the things we teach about how to optimize checkout page copy for maximum conversions.

While Pure Chat’s UI looks a little dated, SamCart’s interface was clean and modern. Its simplicity (not to be mistaken for an absence of features) was certainly a big factor in our final decision.

In fact, the list of SamCart’s features was huge:

fully customizable messaging,

1-click upsells,

multiple payment and subscription options,

robust A/B testing (on pricing, copy, images… everything),

integrations with our favourite tools and refund and

dunning management — and so much more.

Dunning. A funny word. Not a funny thing.

We always offer one-time and monthly payment options for our courses. Monthly payments come with their challenges: on any given month, there are always a bunch of expiring cards and declined payments. Keeping track of these card issues and following up with customers is a real time sink, so the fact that SamCart automatically retries payments and notifies customers of issues was huge.

SamCart’s sandbox feature meant we could deploy and test any of our checkout pages with real credit cards, but without incurring real charges during our tests. Yay!

I loved the fact that you can control which fields are required on the forms, along with the length of guarantee we offer.

Product content, bullets and testimonials are all customizable. After about 20 minutes of configuration, we ended up with a checkout that looks like this (screenshot below is from our most recent launch):

Do these pages convert? Our one-time payment option (shown above) for 10x Emails Mastery converted at 35.19% – a number we’re very happy with and we’ll continue to optimize.

What needs improving

The sales and subscription receipts could use more customization options. Our European customers often request that we include their business info and VAT number and copy multiple people on the receipts. Right now this requires some time-consuming hacks. A big “Notes” field would do the trick.

SamCart’s reporting options are vast. But the date selectors are fussy when you want to choose a custom date range.

And of course, more template customization options would be welcome.

Why we stick with SamCart for our course launches

Support. Awesome support. SamCart uses Intercom (a SaaS product we love and use daily for Airstory) to manage customer communications, and it works so well. They appear to have a big support team with big hearts and plenty of knowledge about the product they’re supporting.

The product-y stuff…

If a customer tells us in a live chat that they want to purchase a multi-user license for a course, it takes me mere seconds to hop over to SamCart, duplicate an existing product, tweak the price and send the customer a link to purchase… right then and there.

If someone abandons our checkout page after having completed the email field, SamCart captures their contact information and creates a Prospects Report for us. This is perfect for sending a quick reminder for them to complete their purchase process or for reaching out to them to answer any remaining questions (remember, they were sooooo close to buying!).

On the last day of a launch and in the last sales email of the launch, we can link straight to our SamCart page. Just bypass the long-form sales page entirely. The prospect is very warm / hot at this point, so a shorter SamCart page moves them faster than a long page designed for low-awareness prospects.

SamCart integrates nicely with ConvertKit. I quickly discovered that we can manage the addition or removal of ConvertKit tags automatically – so we can tag new purchasers in ConvertKit and then suppress their emails from subsequent launch emails; conversely, if we refund someone’s purchase, they’ll be automatically removed from the list of course purchasers. This. Is. Huge.

These are the types of automations that really save us “thought energy.” Between the two of us, there are just so many things to remember. The less we have to think about, the smoother it all goes.

We haven’t even tapped into SamCart’s affiliate management yet. A little research indicates that we’ll be able to recruit affiliates to help sell Copy Hackers courses, and SamCart will handle the signup process, campaigns, commission structure and payouts… something we plan to explore for our next launch.

I think it’s fitting to end here on SamCart because if we were to choose one product in this list that we couldn’t do without now, it’d be SamCart. We love every product on this list, but for us, SamCart is indispensable.

Can we help?

If you have any questions about (1) how we execute our course launches or (2) how we use the tools above, Joanna and I are happy to respond below in the comments.

Here’s to your future successful course launches!

~Lance

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