Learnings from Launching a Course
Motivation
I work in annual time frames. I map out my year ahead, and I try to tick off everything on the list.
At the end of 2022, I had written ‘Create an Email Course’ as something I wanted to accomplish in 2023.
So in 2023, I mapped out my course. Nine modules, broken down into buckets such as creation, deliverability, career progression.
I ran full speed with this course — having hired a videographer, picking out a slide platform, hired talent off of Upwork to transcribe the content into speaker notes. I had all of this content done and dusted within 3-4 weeks. But despite all this, I didn't launch the course until August 2024 — what went wrong?
Read on...
Choosing the tool
For a brief moment, I wanted to host my course on Gumtree because I had taken Jason Rodriguez’s course The Better Email there. I also explored Thinkific, which is a Vancouver-based startup, and my favorite financial content influencer Bridget Casey has her content hosted there, but Thinkific proved to be too expensive. Ultimately I went with hosting my course on Squarespace because it hooked up to my existing Stripe account easily, and it’s where my website is hosted which felt like a really easy learning curve.
Writing content
I hate Google Slides. I said it. I feel like I am always fixing my own mistakes, formatting goes wrong, content isn’t aligned, images get blurry. I’m always disappointed in myself in some capacity.
I one day stumbled across Tome. I wish I could remember where or how I came across it, but it blew my mind. It was the easiest slide/presentation-building technology I’ve come across in ages. The day I discovered it was the same day I started writing and structuring my course. I probably built 50-75 slides the first day, knowledge-dumping all the content I wanted to share.
I see myself adding to this course as time goes on or making new course add-on topics for more intermediate learning, but for now, I’m really happy with where the beginner course content landed.
Filming
I assumed that in order to launch a course, it needed to be filmed professionally. With a teleprompter, lighting, a real camera. So I hired a duo video team to do just that, with the intention of taking that professional content of me and syncing it against the slides. We sat down one morning and knocked out the filming and I felt like I was a real professional!
This video content soon became my biggest hurdle. For ~9 months, I muddled with the video I paid to have filmed, and found myself increasingly frustrated with my lack of video skills. I didn’t like the way I came off in the video — reading from a teleprompter didn’t feel natural, and I couldn’t expand on topics I wanted to mid-video.
I got back on track by finally committing to scrapping the professional video, and going back to a tool that I was incredibly familiar with — Loom! As soon as I made this decision, I had filmed all of the modules over again within a 2 week period — mainly on my lunch breaks and after I closed my work laptop at the end of the day.
Setting a price
One of my favourite email talents in the industry has a course priced at $899. I would love to get to a place where I value my work to the same degree and feel confident that what I am creating is just as valuable, but for now, I want to try and remain accessible and gather as much feedback as I can on the content, layout, and learnings.
My price of $199 I hope is something that individuals could feel comfortable expensing, or at least paying on their own out of pocket. I’ve made sure to offer discounts where I have built a community (ie. Women of Email, my newsletter, and another local Vancouver marketing community). Although I always encourage individuals to reach out if they are keen to take the course but aren’t able to afford it at this time — before I work up the course to increase that price!
What I’ve learned
When I’m feeling stuck, I need to go back to the drawing board. There are multiple roads to get to the same end-destination — this was clearly highlighted in my dragging of the feet between my professional footage vs. Loom.
Other learnings? Stay tuned! With just a week from my launch, the big learnings are surely still to come.