Love the work Andrew puts up; but I wish he would at what Blender Cookie is doing, and learn from their marketing. Cheap, affordable and respectable style of doing things.
I’d love to hear from Andrew concerning what’s been said about his marketing here. We overwhelmingly like and respect his product and skills, but dislike his marketing; some so vehemently that if if they had the money, they wouldn’t buy the product. Most of us also agree that the price is a bit steep for the market, which is flooded with free tutorials, models and textures.
That said, free textures in sig! A $49.97 value, yours free. But act now, these textures are only available until Google Blogspot implodes!
Edit: I apologize for the marketing sarcasm in my posts. I can’t help myself. I’m one of those people who hate infomercial style marketing. I wouldn’t buy any product advertised that way.
Does anyone know how much BlenderCookie makes per product for comparison? I’m curious.
Regardless, I think that there’s probably a better way to garner the real insights of this marketing guru without copying his full heavy-sell style. It seems to me like he may have discovered some helpful things, but is still impaired by some misconceptions. Marketing doesn’t have to be a trick. It’s a way to honestly get your product out to the world and that can help everyone. I think even the best product if marketed poorly will fail to sell, but good marketing knowledge should not diminish the more people who know about it. If you really have a good product you just need to communicate that to others in a way that will get through. That’s all it needs to be, and doing more than that, like is the case here, just contributes to
the notion that maybe the product is not really that great.
Ouch. How dreadful. Just like me? Yea, that’s the nail in the coffin for me. Jackass.
Though all of the previous mentioned factors are more then convincing in dissuading me to buy the product, there is one overarching personal factor why I prefer to purchase books and DVDs over online video courses. This factor is the amount of bandwidth consumed when streaming and downloading the many multiples of videos within the course. I encountered this problem prominently after purchasing the 2010 Blender Training Course from Blender Cookie; the videos within the course were of such large sizes (multiple Gigabytes) and multitudes of numbers that after hours of downloading a single video and repeating this process when subsequent videos were released the bill for usage of the internet comfortably resided within the double digits. After this revelation, I lost the will to download/view subsequent videos from the course, thus rendering the previous money spent and time used as wasteful.
I was expecting to go to Andrew’s site and be totally disgusted and angry, but no, didn’t happen.
Limited time to sign up: He is giving weekly live chat sessions- obviously for this to work people need to be on the same page, so it has to be structured like a college class.
Cost- 200 bucks is pretty reasonable for a 9 week course with live instruction. Plus he did a ton of footwork making texture packs, there’s like 2500 textures here- how long would it take you to compile a collection like that?
Marketing- I see quotes from people, his video, and estimated costs of things- there is now something wrong with people putting a value on their time and effort? Yep, you can get this info for free, if you want to put your own time and effort in, that’s cool too. Nobody is stopping you.
Look, honestly, Blenderguru is not one of my usual stops, I did sign up, but I unsubscribed, no issues. I just don’t get the animosity, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it! Andrew gives a lot of stuff away for free, and generally has a positive impact on the community, unlike this pointless poo-pooing over details.
Personally I see Andrew as an asset to the community. The product in question also seems quite good from the visual trailer itself.
I’d also like to see him continue to be an asset to the community for years to come as I’m sure he does as well, which is why the level/style of marketing - not Andrew himself - has me a little worried.
Some people like Blender for the price point. Others in the community use Blender for it’s openness and may have switched from other tools in part because of previous experience with heavy handed marketing, exclusives, expensive upgrades, etc. I know you can’t please everyone, but it seems risky to me to walk that path and potentially alienate a large chunk of the Blender user base, ie the target market.
So thats why I’ve chipped in to this thread. Hoping to see Andrew’s work continue to help the broadest part of the community possible.
EDIT - Certainly not saying it should be free as in money or beer, just the level/style of marketing
There’s like 3 people who don’t like his marketing- sure he can tone it down in a community that is used to “FREE!” but it’s really not as bad as people are making it out to be.
@ Andrew, you can probably tone it down a bit, obviously your enthusiasm isn’t reciprocated through the cynics in the community. But, do you say screw the cynics, they won’t like it anyway, and move on, or try to please everyone?
The naysayers need to step up and provide similar quality for free, eh? We’ll be waiting…
Challenge accepted. I’ll see what I can cook up 
BlenderGuru might be good at Blender, but he sucks at marketing. The marketing for Nature Academy is some of the worst internet marketing I’ve seen. Charge people an outrageous price to begin with and then tell them in an email that if they don’t buy now the price will be going up in a few months when he decides to re-release the product to the masses.
I hope Andrew falls flat on his face with this one as this makes him a liability to the Blender community. At least he could have charged a reasonable price for the course and chose to include more people instead of trying to exclude people from the Blender community.
After he falls flat on his face this one, he’ll be able to go back and do what he was good at: making quality content for the Blender Community that encourages the use of the program!
I’ll be visiting BlenderCookie and BlenderNerd a lot more now.
@sam Cool,… everyone wins with all the new tuts you’ll be putting up soon! 
Didn’t want to say anything earlier, but I think some were being a bit harsh on Andrew though. His Guru site and tutorials are excellent learning material and really do put Blender in a good light. I was hoping to be able to send some money his way with this one, but it is above what I was willing to pay. I think it is a fair price given similar products that are out there,… just too much for me right now.
Really, Andrew needs to think long term. If he is building a one off product like a shamwow or snuggie then his marketing is fine. The problem lies more in long term brand recognition. If he wants a product that stands the test of time, and builds a good reputation then he needs to choose the marketing that fits. You don’t see Activision advertising their products this way…and they hit over one Billion dollars in less than 2 months. Granted, it is a mass market product, not niche such as Blender tutorials, but the number is hard to shy away from. Cars, Soda, shoes, you name it…any company that makes a item that they intend to keep selling, they don’t market this way. They only stuff that is marketed like this is one off stuff. The problem here is that as a tutorial maker, this is not one off stuff. Probably a quick browse of other CG schools is in order here.
Sure, Andrews marketing is working for him. But he has never tried the other way, making a cool trailer and maybe building up some brand recognition…could work even better! (He could be seen as the ‘go to’ blender tutorial man. The current marketing does not support that.)
And Andrew, I know you read these threads - The one thing you really should think about. Possibly you are successful because the Blender Community wants you to be. You have proved your worth to the community, and the community often goes out of it’s way to support you. I know I was waiting for some paid content from you so that I could toss some money your way. Your work does not go unnoticed - and I was willing to support that. But the secret about the cost and then when it came out not double, but triple what I was expecting, I was taken aback. You had a customer in your pocket (and probably way more than just me) that you lost due to that price (Hey, I can go buy that shiny new PS3 I’ve been staring at for 2 years for that cost). Had you been upfront with the cost range I might still be in your boat, the the fact that it came out of left field left you high and dry. (Other CG schools, a 8 week course costs $1695…but those are 8/hr per day 5 day a week schools)
In finality, you frame yourself to the community. Don’t make yourself into the villain money grubber archtype. I personally think you can make way more money being the ‘good’ guy that everybody wants to succeed and to support. Maybe you feel differently. You are an inspiration, you made your dream a reality. I hope you don’t toss that down drain for the quick buck. The choice is yours!
@sam Nah,… I was just messing with you. I really do enjoy watching other peoples work though. It’s amazing how often you can pick up something new.
Even though the price is pretty high I understand why
Andrew invested a lot of time and money into the Nature Academy and is teaching a subject that a lot of people try to avoid because of the complexity. The Nature Academy is an excellent package.
I think what he is doing is fine and he has all right to do so.
The marketing style is what put it into a bad light and almost made me shy away from it, however, I ended up signing up and I think it is great value for money after all. It’s literally a matter of working two days at minimum wage to be able to afford that (Here in New Zealand at least). Considering the amount of work he had to do, to put together his “academy”, I think it is a fair deal. We can’t expect him to be the “asset” everybody “loves” for producing tutorials and pay his dinner with our thumbs up only…
Though he has provided much useful content, the most emphasis is placed upon the texturing of the models to create realism. The realistic models within the scene are to my knowledge mostly generated via free scripts and add-ons of other Blender users’ creation. Coupled with the price, I remain with no willingness to pay for a comprehensive texturing tutorial, even by a person of such Blender knowledge as Mr Price.
Wow, that is just an amazing undertaking and it really looks like a great package. It looks like you could download the videos and do them at your own pace. Maybe a thing to please more people would be to offer it with and without support and just offer the videos alone for those who only want that.
You really need to work on your maths.