We offer a money back guarantee on our workshops:
- Everybody Codes
- Advanced HTML & CSS
- Intro to Ruby on Rails
- Test-Driven Rails
- Scaling Rails
- Intro to Rails with PostgreSQL
For a one-time, expensive (hundreds or thousands of dollars) purchase of a service like training, a money back guarantee makes a lot of sense.
It’s simple and has a positive effect on our motivations:
- we have to deliver a great service
- we have to talk to people to make sure they’re a good fit for the content
We have to be willing to say “you shouldn’t take this workshop” when we sense a potential student is too advanced or too beginner for the content. The money back guarantee makes that decision easier because it’s not really rejecting revenue if they won’t be happy with the workshop.
It also helps us understand if we’ve priced the workshop correctly.
For the few individuals who have asked for their money back, they don’t say “this workshop was worth $0”, they say things like “for me, it was more like a $900, not a $1,100 course.” So, we refund a portion of the registration and note that we either need to improve the workshop or drop the price a little.
Could it work with SaaS apps
We don’t offer a money back guarantee on our SaaS apps for these reasons:
- They all have 30-day free trials. There’s time for evaluation before paying.
- They start at about $10/month. The financial risk of having a bad experience is very low.
- The nature of subscriptions is such that if people are unhappy, they stop paying. Our motivation to satisfy them is ongoing.
