1-on-1 Coaching With BSJ Is Coming Back Tomorrow At 7:00pm CET

Hey everyone,

Dojo team here.

Two days ago, we told you we were changing how coaching works at the Dojo.

Today, we’re announcing the new system for coaching at the dojo (and what it means for you).

Before we jump in: this email is about our new coaching system, but there's something in here for everyone (including free members!) We're releasing special content that we think you're going to love. More on that at the end.

Whether you're a free member, part of Dojo+, thinking about working 1-on-1 with BSJ, or just on your personal development (in Dota 2 and outside the game too) there will be something in here for you.

Let’s start off with the big change. Before we reopen coaching with BSJ to the public, we're making one massive shift.

We're moving away from live game coaching.

We're talking about the type of live game coaching where BSJ watches you play over the shoulder.

While this can make for funny content, like in this recent video where BSJ coached three Heralds (and they stomped lol) this doesn't quite translate to the best improvement. Let's discuss why:

It can be fun to have a pro backseat drive you while you stomp people. And in the moment, it looks like improvement. I mean, you're playing with a 10k player directing every move. Of course you're going to destroy people at your bracket.

As long as you follow instructions well (albeit easier said than done) in theory all you have to do is click the right buttons and you win.

But the problem is that even though over the shoulder feels effective, it's actually very surface-level.

Here's the problem we ran into.

Live coaching almost always devolves into micromanaging. It's pretty much just backseat driving but in Dota.

"Do this. Go there. Buy this. Take this fight. Back now."

Yes you're busy doing things, but you're pretty much just role playing, not actually learning. You're just following a script.

See it's not that these instructions are bad; they just bypass your natural thinking. This is what we saw with our test group of students.

Players weren't learning how to evaluate the game. They were borrowing BSJ's evaluation. They would walk away with things like "Got it I should buy a meteor hammer" but they didn't actually understand why. They just remembered that they were told to do that.

You're not learning how to evaluate the game. You're borrowing someone else's evaluation.

This is why players can look incredible in coached games, then immediately fall back to their old level the next day.

Nothing internal changes if you don't actually have time to unpack your thinking.

For real learning, you need time to think and reflect. Learning while you're playing the game is just not very effective. BSJ explained it’s actually very overwhelming for both sides. It's just hard/not really effective to try to learn and play at the same time

This is why we’re moving away from over-the-shoulder coaching (at least as a central part of our coaching methodology) towards replay analysis and a question based framework as the center of the experience.

We're not saying there's not a place for it… but live coaching is not the main way to learn. We see live coaching as more of a practice ground for stuff you learn (and a fun outlet) than a learning environment.

Real learning requires time to unpack your thoughts. That's why we're making this shift.

We are making a shift to a coaching style that BSJ actually prefers: replay analysis with live Q&A.

We debated doing this sooner but we wanted to give live game coaching (aka over-the-shoulder) a shot because it was such a popular request.

However, BSJ has always said internally that replay analysis and live Q&A is the experience he feels helps students the most. So it only makes sense we come back to replay analysis as our main method of coaching.

So how does this new replay analysis style work?

Instead of telling you what to do, BSJ watches your game and asks how you arrived at the decisions you made. He forces you to re-calculate based on the information and what you recall from the game to really make you think.

This way, you have time to go back and forth. You explore your thinking to find what's correct and what's lacking.

You’ll discuss questions like:

"What were you looking at?"
"What were you thinking about?"
"What information mattered to you in that moment?"

The goal isn't to give you better answers. The goal is to help you ask yourself better questions.

Think of it like a math problem.

If someone shows you the solution, it always looks obvious after the fact. You nod along and say, "Yeah, that makes sense."

But if you were never taught how to solve the problem, you can't do it again on your own.

Live coaching shows you the answer.

Replay analysis teaches you how to solve the problem.

Dota is a complex system. It might be the most complicated game out there with all the unique rules and complex interactions. That’s why you can't brute force it with instructions. You have to understand it well enough to navigate it yourself.

Plus, we're not trying to create players who need to be told what to do to play well.

We want to teach you to be self-sufficient so you can improve on your own, or even pass knowledge forward. That's the measure of true understanding.

And with our first group of students, this approach worked. We've already started implementing it when students are open to it because most people seem to agree it's better when it comes to learning.

3 of the original VIP students have already re-enrolled for the new system. So we feel pretty good about releasing this to the public now.

Based on what we learned, we've completely redesigned how coaching works at the Dojo.

We're splitting it into two tiers, modeled after the Hypixel ranking system (that’s a callback to a Minecraft server because one of our team members spent years there and we're stealing what works lol).

Here's the breakdown:

Dojo (Free Discord)
Dojo+ (Members Discord + classes)
VIP (1-on-1 Async replay reviews with BSJ)
VIP+ (Complete, 1-on-1 Live coaching experience with BSJ)

Each tier builds on the last. Today we're talking about the VIP tiers (VIP & VIP+).

$80/month
Opens in the coming weeks

This is for players who don't care about talking through problems with BSJ live.

You just want the async replay. Submit your games, get told what you're doing right and wrong, and self-study the rest.

No live calls. No back-and-forth. Just high-level analysis you can study and apply on your own time.

We're holding off on opening VIP for a few weeks because we want to master each product one at a time. We're not rushing this.

$180/month
Opens tomorrow. 10 spots only.

This is for people who want the complete improvement experience.

Not just "what's wrong" but why you're thinking this way, what's broken about that decision, and how an 11k player (top 1000 EU) like BSJ would think instead.

Here's what each 4-week cycle includes:

The goal isn't to overload you with information.

The goal is to give you one clear focus, apply it, and then check that it actually stuck.

Here's a high level of what the Dota Dojo offers as it currently stands. Obviously this is subject to change. And we're still rapidly learning and improving.

The VIP+ is our complete, 1-on-1 coaching tier. It is currently the highest level of coaching at the Dojo.

The focus in the VIP+ is personalized guidance through replay analysis. Replay analysis coaching is what BSJ has been doing with most of his private clients for the past decade, so it only makes sense that it's the highest level of support with him. He's very confident in this experience being worth much more than what we're charging.

We're opening VIP+ to 10 players because it's still early days with this specific format. Although BSJ has been doing coaching for a while, we want to make sure the sign up process, the coaching flow, and the overall experience is dialed as much as it can possibly be over the coming weeks and months.

We're still refining the process with each student, learning as we go and improving the experience. We also know this only works when it stays small and BSJ can actually focus on each student.

So 10 students is the limit for the coming weeks. Once we feel confident, we plan to expand the student count. We imagine it will cap out somewhere between 20 and 50 in the long run.

But because this is still early, this is genuinely the best value you'll ever get with BSJ. Since this is more of a work in progress, we feel it's fair to give these first ten students effectively a ‘discounted’ rate.

A couple more transparency notes on how we plan to scale over time:

This won't always be with BSJ directly.
As we scale, we plan to bring on coaches. If you want 1-on-1 time with an 11k player who's coached thousands of hours, been an analyst, pro player, the whole thing, this is your window. BSJ will likely not always be able to do this. But it makes sense for him to be the one that kicks it off.

The price will likely increase.
This is an introductory offer while we dial in the experience. It's pretty much our version of a beta. That's why we're giving it a discount. We think BSJ's time is realistically worth 2-3x what we’re charging

Access is genuinely limited.
We're not sure how many weeks or months this will be available at this level and with BSJ exclusively.

This is genuinely a limited-time offer (both in price and level of access to BSJ)

If you've been waiting for the right moment to invest in your Dota journey, this is it.

Registration opens tomorrow at 12:00pm Central Time (NA) or 7:00pm CET (EU). We wanted to be fair for North American and European students but we know there's no perfect time to drop. We decided some time in the next 24 hours is the most fair.

If this sounds like what you've been looking for, be ready. Spots will fill quickly. Three of the spots have already been taken by previous VIP members.

If you're unsure about 1-on-1 coaching, Dojo and Dojo+ are always available. But if you're ready for focused, ongoing coaching that changes how you think about Dota, we'll see you in VIP+.

This will be announced exclusively to the Dota Dojo Discord members so you've got to be in the Discord to sign up for it. (it's free to join the Discord, we just want all signups to be in one place so it's not confusing)

If this sounds like a fit, you can click the button to join the Discord for free:

Once you're inside, it's first come, first served when we drop the link to sign up tomorrow.

Quick last note:

We know 1-on-1 coaching with BSJ is specifically for people who want personal support and direct feedback. That's why it’s expensive and very time limited by design.

But we are aware that only a small subset of the community are privileged enough to be able to do something like this. We want to make sure the entire community gets value from the VIP system. So here's what we're doing:

All VIP and VIP+ coaching sessions will be organized and released for free on the Dota Dojo YouTube channel, as well as in the Dojo Discord.

Whether you're a free member or paid, all the content and recordings are available to you at no cost.

This is our way of making coaching accessible for everyone.

Obviously, you have to pay for BSJ to work with you personally. But if you don't have the resources for 1-on-1 coaching, you can find someone at your MMR or role in the library and see exactly what BSJ tells them.

We'll also build in public so you can see the notes that BSJ is sending to students and everything else he does in the Discord. So yes, even free members will be able to look in at the VIP coaching experience.

Edge-case note: If you just want to talk with BSJ privately, we made a new solution for this. We've moved his private one-on-one sessions to https://metafy.gg/@bsj. Here, sessions are not recorded, documented, or shared with the community. If privacy is your jam, you can book there for a premium. Otherwise we're building in public so everybody benefits.

For example: many of you watched the team of Heralds get coached on BSJ's main channel. That was the one I had mentioned at the start of this email.

But did you know the full VOD is free for everyone on the Dota Dojo YouTube?

Here's the video: BSJ Dota 2 Team Coaching Session, 500 MMR

That's the kind of content we'll be releasing from all our VIP sessions. Free for everyone at youtube.com/@DotaDojoCoaching.

We know some of you might be thinking: "You guys have been focused on paid stuff a lot recently. What about free features?"

We want to address this head-on.

Yes, we are focused on building paid products. We have a team behind the scenes pouring into this community, and BSJ is making loads of sacrifices to make this happen. That costs money, and we need to sustain what we're building.

But our mission goes beyond that.

We're here to help gamers improve inside the game of Dota 2 and outside as people as well.

Everything we build is for the Dota 2 community and for gamers. All of our content will always be free.

When we do coaching, we document the best practices and release them for free on BSJ's YouTube channel and the Dota Dojo YouTube channel. We post the full sessions. We give the notes out to everyone. This takes time and effort, but we do it because we believe in giving back.

For all these reasons, it's important for us to be clear that the paid stuff fuels the free stuff. One wouldn't be possible without the other.

At the same time, even though we need to gatekeep our team's time to be sustainable from a business standpoint, anything that can be free, will be made free.

That’s why all of our content, videos, courses, tools, guides, resources and all that stuff, is free for the entire community. We're not here to gatekeep Dota 2 improvement or self improvement. That's our commitment to the Dota community.

With that being said, thank you for being part of our mission.

We want you to always know this: whether you have the means and desire to support us with dollars, or you just support us with your time, attention, and feedback, we appreciate you.

See you tomorrow at 12:00pm Central Time (NA) or 7:00pm CET (EU),
The Dota Dojo Team

P.S. If you're interested in more personal development stuff, BSJ just did a podcast with Dr. K from HealthyGamerGG where he talks about the Dojo and our mission with coaching.

If you're interested, click here to watch the full podcast.