Down to Business: Poker Training (Part 3)
Welcome to part 3 of 3 reviewing the journey of Run It Once Training!
The feedback for this series has been overwhelmingly positive, but a minority of you have expressed that you’re only here for the poker knowledge.
Don’t worry – we’ll be getting back to that next week!
Returning to our Roots
Over the last two weeks, we’ve covered the RIO Training’s past. Today, I want to discuss the present and future.
When we first launched Run It Once, our mission statement consisted of two principles:
If poker training were an airplane, Run It Once would be the first-class cabin.
We want the consensus amongst poker players to be that Run It Once is clearly the best.
In my opinion, we never wavered from these objectives from the perspective of our offering.
We continued to be picky about design and user experience.
We’ve continued to release 2 videos, every single day, for the last 11 years. Nobody else can say this.
In my very biased eyes, we continued to deliver the most high quality content from the best pros.
But, somewhere along the line, there no longer was the same consensus.
If you polled the poker community about who the best training site was in 2023, I think we would come out on top, but I don’t really know.
We certainly wouldn’t capture 90% of the votes as we could have years ago.
Now I don’t think this represents a failure on our part. Let’s give credit where credit is due:
Many fierce competitors have emerged in the years since we first launched.
They emulated many elements of our approach and added their own twist, just as we did with our previous competition.
So what does being the best look like now?
Structure
On one hand (and yes, this is self-serving and perhaps my bias speaking), most of the competitors nowadays have the same sporadic and limited video release schedules we decided to crush 11 years ago. I wonder sometimes if it’s just that we’re still getting smashed on marketing when I see that there’s debate over who’s best.
On the other hand, I recognize the benefit of far fewer videos taught mostly by the same few coaches and, as a result, a safer-feeling and more continuous experience for students.
We’re not going to change our approach of having a large swath of great pros making videos, each bringing their own expertise and approach to the game to the table.
However, we will learn from our competitors and create more structure.
We decided to have pros create mini-courses within our Elite program rather than keeping the library largely one-off videos on whatever the coach was inspired to do that day.
We’ve made improvements to our algorithm to recommend videos that specific users might need, and we’re enhancing the curation and organization of our massive (8,000 video!) library.
Community
When we launched Run It Once, forums were the main way that the poker community congregated and shared information.
So, we created forums with some cool new features, aiming to enhance the way poker players interacted online.
However, this initiative turned out to be one of my failures.
Despite our efforts to improve the forum experience by combining it with a social feed – allowing users to browse in a forum view or a follower view to see what people were posting – it didn't catch on as we hoped.
I think the design was great, but I underestimated the unbeatable power of all-topic social feeds. If the poker community is already conversing on platforms like Twitter or X, they’re less likely to migrate to our poker-focused space.
Forums still exist, but most community interaction is done through major social media platforms or more immersive, interactive, real-time community containers, like Discord.
While we’ve had a RIO Discord for a long time, we are going to prioritize and reinvent it in 2024, including a strong members-only community.
Open to Beginners
As mentioned in previous posts, we neglected non-professionals for many years.
We have some courses now geared towards beginners, but we have more beginner-friendly content and features on the way!
That said, Elite and Essential will remain focused on high-level play, and you will still have trouble understanding a large portion of the content there if you’ve never studied poker before.
The Best Pros
While we continued to have great players and coaches throughout these 11 years, we had lost some of the big-name recognition that we once had.
We spent months trying to bring in some more big guns.
It took a sizable increase in our pro budget, but we managed to succeed in bringing pros like Jeremy Ausmus, Dan Smith, Jason Koon, Justin Bonomo, Ryan Leng, Kevin Martin, and more, onto our already big pro roster.
And we’re absolutely not done hunting the best talent out there!
Prices
An increase to our pro budget (during a time when membership was declining) was something we needed to figure out how to make work.
We discussed the idea of raising prices significantly. As I mentioned in Part 1, I think we set the price of Elite ($99/mo) too low 11 years ago, and we hadn’t changed it since.
And sure, inflation – prices are going up everywhere.
But the main thing we wanted to look at was what price felt not only appropriate compared to our competitors, but was a good deal. If we (and I) are going to tell people they should choose us, we (I) need to believe it’s the best choice.
After a detailed competitor analysis and a lot of conversations with our team, we settled on $199/mo for the new Elite program, and we also decided we’d offer an annual membership at a steep discount ($1400) to keep prices not too far off for the most dedicated members.
(In the past, we didn’t offer an annual membership outside of once or twice-a-year promotions, and the discount was much smaller.)
We also knew the entire time that we’d be grandfathering in any current members at our old price for as long as they stayed an Elite member.
Reception
We gave people a couple of weeks after announcing our plans to get locked in at the old price, before permanently increasing it on January 5th.
While we didn’t really know what to expect, we were all very pleased with the results. A lot of players came in and invested in their 2024 poker education (and the option to remain at our old price point).
We still have a lot of work to do, and only time will tell if the market responds to our new and improved roster and product at its new and improved price tag, but I’m happy with the start.
Some Honesty. Some Promotion.
When we were gearing up for the Elite relaunch, I thought about sending a newsletter about it.
I’m always wrestling with the level of marketing I want to do in places like this – to followers and subscribers like you.
In the end, I decided not to. I’d just relaunched the newsletter here on a new platform (hence the different design, if you’ve been here since 2023), and I don’t know… I just didn’t want to.
If I’m being honest, it all stems from a fear of judgment – a desire to be liked.
I want you to think highly of me. I want you to see the value that I deliver in these newsletters and think I’m so kind and generous.
I don’t want anyone to think I’m here to trick them into buying stuff they don’t need. I don’t want you to think I’m writing to you in hopes of a payday.
So, as he often does, the need-to-be-liked Phil won this battle.
The Elite relaunch came and went with no emails to you about it.
And then an interesting thing happened…
I felt guilty.
I felt guilty that some of you didn’t hear about what we were doing, and that I didn’t give you the chance to be grandfathered in forever at our old price.
One of those lose-lose situations, I guess. I’d have felt bad whatever I decided.
After feeling that, I set out to write a newsletter about it the very next week, and extend the chance to get in for any of you.
And as I geared up to write it…
NTBL-Phil won again.
So, I reached out to him and made a compromise.
I would write about the Run It Once Elite relaunch, but in a way that I hoped would deliver value. I’d talk openly about our business in ways I never had shared before. I’d reflect on the lessons I’ve learned in hopes that they’d help you avoid the same mistakes I made.
And I’d try to make it interesting.
Here We Are
So, after three posts on Run It Once’s journey, we are now done.
The truth that I am still trying to face is that wanting you to think I share so much knowledge with you, mainly between this newsletter and my YouTube channel, purely out of the kindness of my heart, is silly. It’s wanting you to believe a lie.
I love writing these newsletters (YT videos, a little bit less so), and I absolutely love when people are helped by them. I love hearing about the difference I’ve made in readers' and viewers’ games and lives. It’s the best!
But being realistic… If I thought I’d never generate any income from my social media or my newsletter, I highly doubt I’d be doing it.
I’m constantly busy. The hours I spend working on these each week isn’t nothing. The time I put into YouTube isn’t nothing. The money I invest in my social media team isn’t nothing (and might shock you!).
Someone is editing this and formatting this.
Someone created the thumbnail, and someone is managing that creation process.
If you’re reading this on web rather than email, someone designed the website and another person created it.
Multiple people edit my videos, collect clips for me to review, give notes on edits, manage thumbnail design, contribute to ideation, post shorts every day, and many more things.
So, the truth is that I’m looking to see a return on all of that investment over time.
I like doing this, and I try hard to make this newsletter as valuable as possible for you.
And, also, it’s not charity.
I’m not being kind by writing to you each week. I want you to think I am, but I need to get over that.
There will be advertising, whether for products I made or own or from 3rd party advertisers.
The good news (for all of us) is that you don’t need to buy anything. In fact, I don’t want you to invest in anything that won’t be more than worth it for you.
You can simply enjoy the free content for as long as I continue to create it.
And in that way, if you’re enjoying it, I guess you’re rooting for me to earn my investment back, too, so that I keep going for a long time.
In today’s post, I spoke highly of RIO Elite. I said I think it was already the best, and that it’s now improved and improving.
That will make some of you interested in it.
Fortunately, I believe everything I said!
