
An Expensive Lesson: How I Wasted Thousands on a “PRO”
We knew when we got the idea to make our course that we wanted to do it right. I thought of all the videos I had watched from Ramit Sethi and wanted to be like him. So we rented an all brick studio. Hired a professional video guy and filmed it all in one day. We even had a teleprompter. When it wasn’t perfect, we even took off another day from work and filmed again. This time we rented a house by the beach.
Do you know how much of those videos we used in our final course? One segment. Five minutes out of the countless hours that we filmed. We lost thousands including the time we had to take off from work.
There were a ton of lessons we learned, expensive lessons. So you guys can learn from them. First, we were trying to do too much at once. Peter Kim and I are both physicians, so we had a little money saved up for the project. We decided to do it the best we could afford all at once.
Instead, we should have thought of the project as a startup. We would have tried to do it the best we could with limited resources. What people often call a minimal viable product. The best we could do at the time. And then try to improve it over time.

We didn’t need to hire a professional videographer. And actually, we didn’t even know what qualities make up a good one. We realised there were different types of video professionals. And that we had hired the wrong one. Some of our other friends started with their phones. They filmed themselves. We ended up wasting money and more importantly time.
Once, we did some more research, we found out that most people do their courses with voice over slides. We wanted to be different for the sake of being different. In the end, that’s what we did too. There was no good reason to have us in the video. This way we could make a new video at home. Our course would be a living, breathing class that we could update in real-time. There was a reason the industry standard was to do things a certain way.
To summarize: