Next week at this time, I’ll be closing the doors for sign ups on the G3 Program. No, this isn’t a marketing gimmick, it’ll be permanent. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the successes/failures of the program, as well as talk about the changes and new direction I plan on taking with the next iteration, which will hopefully be ready by the end of the year.
The goal with G3 was ambitious. It was to take any guy, in any situation, and give him the tools and outline the path for him to become at least competent with women in a short amount of time. The program itself is structured on taking a guy from being able to do nothing with women, to eventually being able to sleep with one at the end, hence the name, “Get a Girlfriend, Guaranteed.”
The unique feature of the program was that progressive action was built into it. It wasn’t just enough to read about conversation habits and how to be a more dynamic speaker. At the end, you are given half a dozen interactive exercises and goals to go out and do before moving on to the next step. And each mission is slightly more challenging than the last, designed to build up situational confidence slowly but surely as well as the correct habits through repetition. From there, each step progressed sequentially focusing on a more advanced habit, until finally, and ideally, the user was having dates and hooking up with women.
For example, Step 3 of the program is on approaching. It has 10-15 pages of information on approaching and a couple audio interviews, some infield footage, and then gives the user about 10 goals or missions to go out and do so that he’s able to approach women consistently.
Then you move on to Step 4 which is basic conversational skills, where you’re given another 10-15 pages of material, there’s another audio clip, some more infield footage, and then you’re given another handful of exercises to go out and do.
So on and so on. There are 12 steps in all, from basic mindsets and approaching, all the way up through dates, escalating and sex.
I’ll be honest, the results of the program have been here and there. Some very good. Some non-existent. (None bad, thankfully.) The guys who seemed to benefit the most were guys who already had some level of competence at this stuff — whether natural or learned — but never put the pieces together in a coherent way and therefore never figured out a way to be more consistently successful. Strangely, it seems intermediate guys seemed to get a lot more out of the program than newbies, something which is cool, but I didn’t originally intend. Most of these guys ended up getting laid 1/2 or even 1/3 of the way through the program. A few even got girlfriends.
But many less experienced users worked their way through a small portion of the program and then just stopped. Many of them stopped logging in altogether. Others became seemingly stuck in places. And unfortunately, I don’t think the program addressed these guys’ needs too well.
The guys who just stopped and never logged in, it’d be easy for me to sit here and chastise them for being keyboard jockeys and never working up the balls to get out and do the exercises. But one has to assume they were motivated and prepared at one point. They paid money for access after all. And I made it clear in the sales video that they will be expected to get off their ass and do something. So I choose to take the responsibility here. I didn’t engage them well enough or present exercises and activities that appealed to their needs well enough.
The segment of guys who DID go out and try to do the exercises but just got stuck, the vast majority of these “stuck” moments occurred in either the approaching and conversation segments of the program. In hindsight, when creating exercises and goals to “stair-step” guys into becoming good at something, it appears that the exercises and activities in these sections sometimes made too large of leaps in difficulty in one to the next.
For example, one of the moderate approaching exercises may to stop and ask 10 women for directions and then ask them how their day is going. Then the next exercise would be to stop approach 5 women directly. Apparently, for a lot of guys, a jump like these between the individual exercises were too great, and they’d never work up the nerve to do the second one despite doing the first one repeatedly. Or they’d try, freak out, and fail and give up the program. I’m also going to assume that a lot of the keyboard jockeying guys who just dropped out entirely did so because they took one look at the exercises, became way too intimidated, decided that it was too hard, and then I never heard from them again.
So with all of that said, I’m closing the doors on the G3 program. Current members will remain members and can still use it, but sign ups will be closed next Saturday, September 24th. The reason is I am currently building a new series of online coaching programs. They’ll be structured the same way as G3, but will more specifically focused and attempt to remedy some of G3′s flaws. Call the new programs “G3 2.0″ if you’d like, although they’ll be named something else entirely. Some brief details about the upcoming programs:
- Three separate programs on approaching, conversations, and attraction – It became clear pretty quickly with G3 that most guys signed up to address one specific problem area they had. As much as I enjoyed putting together a total A-to-Z course on improving with women, the majority of guys who joined, joined specifically to work on either approaching, conversations or attraction/escalation. As a result, most guys ended up skipping around or skipping steps entirely. Which is fine. I guess it was a bit naive of me to assume that everyone would follow everything in sequential order.
This will also allow me to “max out” certain areas. One weakness of G3 is that it merely gets a user competent in everything rather than mastering something specific. It helps you to get just good enough at approaching, just good enough at conversations. The new programs will be far more robust and can max you out in any given area. So you won’t just be able to approach, but you’ll be able to approach anywhere, any time, any situation.
- Less material, more interactive – Despite G3′s emphasis on action over intellectualizing, the damn thing has over 350 pages of content and videos. So… yeah. Nice one, Mark. The new programs will probably feature about half as much content — really, the bare minimum — with everything oriented towards drills and action, rather than reading and understanding. Exercises and missions will be expanded, and stair-stepped at a far more gradual pace.
For instance, in G3, approaching only had one step and about 10 exercises. Conversations had two steps and about 12 exercises. Same with attraction. The new programs will each have around 20 steps each, each with its own missions and exercises. Improvement and desensitization will be more gradual as well as elongated. Lessons will also be more, so you won’t just be reading stuff, but actual have to write and interact with examples given. You’ll be expected to write about your experiences every step of the way, both to receive feedback, but also to process what you’ve learned and accomplished.
- Focus on vulnerability and emotions – The G3 content is very pragmatic and to-the-point. “Do this 10 times and it’ll be easier,” type of stuff. And although that works, we can do better. The new programs will be focusing much more on the emotional process that guys go through with this stuff and preparing them to deal with it. If two guys both get rejected three times in a row, they’ll process it in entirely different ways. Some guys get angry. Others get apathetic and make excuses. Others become invigorated. Hopefully, the new programs will provide an outlet for them to notice and deal with each of their unique processes and be aware of what’s going on. Instead of just getting frustrated and quitting.
Like I said, the general structure will be the same. Online membership sites. Subscription-based. Current G3 members will get a discounted price on the new programs. Users will be able to sign up for all three programs at once or each one individually. Expect the prices to be higher.
Launch is still at least a month or two away. In the meantime, if you’d like to join the current G3 program, I invite you to. It’s still a great resource for guys who feel comfortable going out, but haven’t been able to “put the pieces together” yet, or who feel like they’re just going out aimlessly with no direction.. It’s also great for anybody who needs to be held accountable or who needs a refresher on all of the fundamentals.
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Hey, Mark,
As a current G3 user, I want to say that I was thrilled to read this post. I think your appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of your existing program is on the money. You do have a good program, and its primary strength is, as you said, your ‘staircase’ approach to success. Guys want structure. They want to approach challenges in a deliberate and structured way. Your program gives them that structure and that makes it very appealing.
At the same time, you’re right – your current G3 program covers *everything* from tip to toe, and maybe that is too broad for one 12-step program. Your Step 1 is all about lifestyle, for example. It’s full of great ideas, but it’s almost a program in itself. I read that Step and found it would be a project on its own just putting that area of my life in order. That was no fault of your own – you were right – my lifestyle did need a lot of work. But finding your life’s mission? Starting a workout program and fixing your diet? Becoming a Renaissance man, so to speak, familiar with all forms of culture? That is an ambitious project, like a total life renovation, really. I don’t know if a single lifestyle program would be attractive or successful or if it would even be practical to make one – I just thought I’d mention this to you. There must be guys coming onto your program who probably aren’t ready to seriously undertake Steps 2-12 at all, or at least not those parts that directly build toward a relationship, and who won’t be for a while.
On the other hand, I think it’s excellent that you are breaking down the existing program into separate modules that will each contain a refined and progressive set of drills. Approaches, conversations, attraction… I think this is a great idea, Mark.
I want to focus now on the community aspect of your program. I hope this is something you will push forward into your new programs as I felt it was the second or third best feature of G3. Your third point in the above post talked about dealing with the emotional side of the journey. Maybe this is already your intention, but I see an opportunity here to unite the community aspect of your program with this new feature. Can you in some way encourage guys to take their introspection to the forum? They’ll find more support that way, break out of their own heads, where they’re probably just spinning wheels anyway, and get help fixing the problems they’re having. When they hear guys saying in response, “Oh, yeah, I know what you mean, I’m going through the same thing” – it’s going to encourage them. This is obviously something they can do already, without your encouragement; but maybe there is something you can do to give guys a strong push – and I mean it, a *strong push* – to use the damned forum and contribute toward the growth of a real community. Then as new guys come along they’ll discover they not only have a great structured program to follow but also a whole group of guys as well who know what they’re going through and maybe have a lead on them and can help them along.
I wanted more of that community in the existing G3 program. Right now it’s like guys who go onto the forum are just talking to themselves. In other words, people don’t often respond to them. Blaming you for that is like blaming the president for the state of the economy – there’s only so much you can do. I’m just saying, anything you can do to spur that community into life is a good thing. For example, you were good about responding when you saw people address specific questions to the community. That was cool. Another thing, though, might be just popping up now and then even when people are describing experiences and not asking questions. That just reinforces the fact that you are present, paying attention, and available to your customers – that you are ‘in this’ too. ‘Cause of course, you are the guy with the experience, the guru, the one whose lead the guys are following closely… so I think just knowing you are an active and dynamic presence in the community will do much to draw guys to be more active in it themselves. Also, and I know you were trying to do this, having a cadre of veteran customers working the community will be good too and would of course be facilitated by dropping the subscription payment once the proper conditions are met.
One final thought on community and then I’ll wrap up. Is there any way you can create one community forum that is accessible to all programs? I’d hate to use one of your programs, and then leave it for the next one, and lose my existing community in the process. If you could make this one forum and maybe ‘gate off’ those parts of it that customers haven’t paid to access, but somehow also allow them to keep the parts they did pay to access in the past, that would be cool. Maybe the programming would be kinda tricky, I don’t know, but that would be a great thing.
So those are just a few thoughts, Mark. When your new programs come out I will probably drop the existing G3 and sign up for one of those instead. You’ve done a great job in this program and I wish you the best.
David C.
Something else just popped into my head – I don’t want to flood your comment section with all my dumb ideas – but as far as community goes… what if you posted something in the forum on your own once in a while, maybe once or twice a week? Like, you could just share a story about how you went out recently and had a conversation with a girl and it went like this . Or how you’re currently dating and you and your girlfriend went through this . Or just talk about something from your past or whatever. Or you were just reviewing Step 2 and you had this thought . Just little ‘Hey this is Mark and here’s what I’m thinking’ posts.
So excited for these programs. I wanted to subscribe to the G3 program but I know I only need help with a couple areas and I didn’t want to pay for content I wasn’t going to use. The fact that you are making each program specific to each area, makes the program more reasonable, practical, and more appealing. I just hope it isn’t too expensive because I’m a college student and my budget is a little tight right now, but the programs will, no doubt, be worth it.
And to redsunrising, those are some pretty good ideas that would definitely improve the effectiveness of the programs.
An interesting idea redsun brought up was a module devoted completely to lifestyle. I’m sure there would be quite a few complications –How do you develop something so necessarily unique to individuals with general a one-size-fits-all regimen?– But if you could pull that off, it would be incredible.
My biggest reason (…ok, excuse) for not joining G3 was feeling that I didn’t have the lifestyle, and I should just be working on that. But without the motivation of structure, the simple “get a good career, join social clubs, make healthy friends, eat well, join a gym, etc.” advice rang hollow. I’m certain many of us have huge potential, but are limited by lack of motivation.
Don’t think of meeting women as something separate from your lifestyle. It’s part of it. Working on all these areas (fitness, nutrition, socializing, dating) builds momentum. Everything reinforces everything else.
This is exactly why I think a structured take on lifestyle could be so beneficial. A distilled, practical, drill-based way for those who didn’t start in the best situations (almost everyone), have bad mindsets, etc. to get themselves at least working on their lifestyle in a disciplined, organized way. Just something to get up to baseline and give you the tools to continue in a structured way, with emphasis on building attractive/useful habits and mindsets, perusing your personal dreams, etc. Not a cookie cutter guide to being an exact copy of X.
There have already been shotty, fluffed up attempts at this (Tony Robbins, etc). But nothing with the structure we’re talking about here.
You could say that people should work their lifestyle problems out on their own… but then again, you could say that people should learn to approach, communicate and attract on their own.
The potential of the idea seems huge to me. I think it would benefit a lot of people if somebody did it. (Even T.R. has benefited many people with his babble) Of course I’ll continue my efforts to work on my own lifestyle, which obviously includes everything in life. I’m just saying a this type of tool would be an immensely useful way to make the practice of improving more efficient. And with emphasis Mark puts on it, it just makes sense to devote a module to it
+1 this. Great comment.
This is a great idea. Building such a program would be very difficult and involved though. Everything would have to be interactive since lifestyles vary so much.
Mark, how are you feeling about your marketing these days? I think you still have a long way to go in that department. I can see a number of areas in which you could easily improve and make massive gains. I think you should have a bit of a read on inbound marketing, because your business is exactly where that theory applies. You definitely need to look into optimizing your SEO (googling get a girlfriend should lead to your g3 page being on the first page of results), and I think you need to work posting more than just links to articles on your Twitter. How’s having the newsletter form pop-up on the site working out?
I’ve done some SEO on and off over the past 2 years. Unfortunately, getting on the first page for some of these keywords is not nearly as easy at it seems.
As for the marketing, I’m still lukewarm on it, and I still agree that it has a long way to go. I plan on redoing it and spending more time testing it once the new programs are out.
I used to try to do kind of everything at once: build content, create marketing, get traffic, etc. And I guess in the beginning you have to do that. And so I did all three of them enough to just be competent and make some money. But now I see it like this:
Make a shitload of amazing content and products —> Build great and congruent marketing that’s well-tested —> Go out and buy/get shit-tons of traffic.
I see each one as kind of a year-long project. Right now I’m doing the content.
The pop up surprisingly has done very little for new opt-ins.
I will say, one thing that Models really showed me is that: 1) people who like the blog basically buy my shit regardless of how I market it, and 2) 90% of the people who buy my shit are people from my blog.
The blog itself is really the life-blood, and it seems people either just overlook or don’t care about the direct marketing stuff that much. Which is fine, because I’m not very good at the direct marketing stuff, and it’s not really congruent with who I am. I am a good blogger though and it’s what I love doing.
There’s going to be a general site re-brand in the near future, and all of these things are going to be re-positioned. I kind of want to get away from the “Pick Up” label. I feel it’s a bit limiting.
Totally agree about the pickup label. It suggests a focus on ONS, which you’ve obviously moved away from, and also it’s still a pretty charged word, even if you’ve distanced yourself from the PUA community. For example, if you had a ‘Insert new name here’ Facebook page, I would definitely ‘like’ it, and would be happy to have FB integrate with your website in some way. However, as long as there’s that ‘pickup’ label associated then I’m uncomfortable about showing that connection, because of the way it could misrepresent me to people who don’t really know me (e.g. girls I meet and then add on FB). I think there are probably other customers of yours who feel the same. It’s a shame, because I’ve liked ‘Practical Pickup’ as a name since the start, and still do, even if it no longer completely accurately reflects your work.
As for direct marketing not really being your thing, well that’s exactly why I recommend you look into inbound marketing. Have a look at this Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing. As Wikipedia says, the phrase inbound marketing was coined by Brian Halligan, the founder of Hubspot, a marketing company are based in Cambridge, MA. My best friend in Boston actually just got a job there recently. Anyway, Hubspot are all about creating great free content, sharing it through-out the outlets in your industry, and then letting people come to you. That’s exactly what I think you do, but not well enough. I just started working for a start-up when I got back home to NZ, and I’ve been reading a shitload on marketing, sales, etc, and though I don’t use their software, I read their blog all the time (blog.hubspot.com). They post way too much shit, so it can be overwhelming, but I recommend checking out some of their ebooks or webinars (they recently set a world record for most attended webinar) and the occasional blogpost here or there.
Aside from revamping the G3 model, and continuing to crank out material on the blog and forums, I’m not so sure you do need to continue to focus on building content. You already have a massive amount here. I think you need to move forward to getting that out there as much as possible. I think those guest articles and the reddit IAmA you did were a good start, but you’re bigger and better than that. You should be trying to get published in serious magazines, newspapers and do some other dating blogs. Date me DC or Arden Leigh might be good maybe?- They’re both female bloggers, so might help get some more female feedback to see how you can further appeal to women- that mythical dating advice place that attracts women because of the men it turns out that you recently mentioned.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
Oh, and my friend’s dad is pretty good at SEO. He got the number one google search result for his wife’s 5 employee accounting firm over firms that have 100+ employees. So I’m going to chat with him soon about how I can improve my company’s seo results, and I’ll give you some advice from there if you’d like. Unfortunately with SEO there is just a mountain of crap advice to wade through.
I’ll check out those links. I think I’ve started doing the inbound marketing without realizing it. I just noticed a while back that my major competitive advantage in this industry is that I can a) put out much higher quality content than anyone else and b) put it out at a much higher volume than anyone. So I figured if I just churned out as much as possible in as many places as possible, it’d take care of the rest.
And it largely has. My traffic has quadrupled in the last year without me pushing aggressively for new traffic, but just focusing on content.
Some other comments:
- I agree about putting my stuff in more mainstream places. But the roadblock there is again the “Pick Up” brand. I do plan on pursuing this more next year.
- Totally agree about the Facebook stuff. I mean, I don’t even have this site listed on MY OWN Facebook page… I realized a while back that there’s something seriously wrong with that. I should have a company that I’m proud of, guys who read my stuff are proud of, and girls who find my stuff can be proud of. That’s my ultimate goal.
- As far as content goes, I don’t mean blog content, but products. Creating a decent upsell chain. There are still some gaping holes in my product funnel, primarily an “inner game” type seminar. As of now my marketing is good enough to get the job done. In the meantime, re-branding is highest priority (to open up new, larger avenues for myself), but to do that, I need to redo G3 first.
So I guess I agree with just about everything you say, some of it for quite a while…
Unfortunately it doesn’t all happen at once… revamping the products allows me to re-brand the company, which allows me to pursue new marketing avenues, which allows me to grow to the next level.
I’m getting there… slowly but surely.
Mark, all I ask when it comes to marketing is, please do not begin marketing like LoveSystems. I fucking hate how LoveSystems markets, it’s all about turning the people that come to their site into a bunch of sheep and then using that to sell them products endlessly. It always feels like Savoy is trying to sell me something whenever he posts (because he is).
I like your strategy is right now. I feel connected to this site in a way because you come off like a genuine person over a businessman.
Seconded.
Former G3 student, but quit due to being (student) poor. Just wanted to chip in my 2 cents.
The one thing that would’ve increased my success rate by 500% are videos. But not just any video of pickups or approaches (we have your pickup tube site for that), but videos of you actually doing the exercises individually. I think this would be the single easiest way to reduce fear in students as it allows them to see
a) how easy it is to perform the exercises
b) how the girls react to things like this (e.g. a lot of students still think girls will slap or laugh at us if we approach them)
c) the actual vibe and atmosphere of the pickup (which obviously cannot be expressed through words).
I think most people learn best when they are SHOWN rather than told.
Please seriously consider this Mark. I cannot think of a better way to motivate, teach and kill off anxieties than this.
There will be audio/video of me doing the conversation exercises.
I wanted to record myself doing most of the basic approaching exercises, but I was only back in the US for 10 days this summer. That and decent infield footage is a massive pain in the ass to get.
Maybe this winter when I’m back in the States.
Oh and thanks to all of the commenters. Your feedback is very helpful and appreciated.
Definitely looking forward to the new conversation program!
I think out of all the sections, the approach exercises would probably benefit most from in-field footage. For me personally, I’ve never approached girls cold before G3, and perhaps more importantly, I’ve never really seen anyone else do it (well). So there’s definitely a ‘fear of the unknown’ element to the whole thing where I couldn’t even IMAGINE how someone could go up to a girl and start talking. But what helped me get over this was actually watching a half-jokey approach video on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9QS28m1j9w) that opened my eyes to the possibilities. It’s a bit like Style when he first met Mystery in The Game- he didn’t even know this stuff was POSSIBLE. But witnessing it all in action allowed him to see that even he could do it, and provided the context for him to do so.
For me, the main obstacles to a home study program are motivation and fear. But if you combine your patented incremental approach along with videos showing HOW it’s done, there really are no excuses left not to do the exercises.
What intrigued me about this post is that you mentioned that “[m]ost of [the intermediates] ended up getting laid 1/2 or even 1/3 of the way through the program. A few even got girlfriends.” I would say that I am at an intermediate level. I have completed more than one thousand day time approaches but am having some trouble on dates and getting consistent lays. Would it be worth purchasing this product of should I just wait until the next version of this product comes out? I hesitated to purchase this is because a lot of products are geared to complete newbies and I don’t get much benefit out of them.
Have you read Models yet?
It sounds like your problem is either you’re overgaming and getting in your own way, or you’re not escalating well.
If it’s the overgaming, then Models will help. If it’s an escalation issue, then the last half of G3 will help.
I haven’t read Models yet. I don’t consider my style gamey at all: I rarely use gimmicky routines or any of that weird community stuff and focus my dates on being “normal”, having fun and establishing a solid emotional connection. So maybe it’s the escalation.
Yeah, sounds like lack of escalation. Second half of G3 could help. Or you could wait for the new program. It’s a few months off though.