Every Indie Hacker Has an Online Course in Them with Andrew Barry, Marie Poulin, and Ali Abdaal

Courtland Allen: 0s

What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from indiehackers.com and you're listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. On this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.

All right. We're here today with some of the best online course creators that I know. So many indie hackers who are getting started and who are successful are successful because they're finding ways to teach other people online. I think the most straightforward way to teach people online is through online courses.

We've got Andrew Barry, who runs the On Deck Course Creators Fellowship. On Deck has blown up. Everybody's talking about it. The people who aren't talking about it seem to be part of it already.

We've also got Marie Poland who runs an online course called Notion Mastery. Marie’s badass. I don't know if this is public, Marie, if it's not, we'll bleep it out. I don't even know if this is accurate, but I heard your course sold like five or 600 grand in revenue last year. Something insane.

Marie Poulin: 1m 8s

In the last year, yeah.

Courtland Allen: 1m 8s

It's crazy cause I've been seeing you teach everybody Notion and I just didn't realize… I would've guessed like a fifth of that. So, I'm super impressed. I think it's amazing. Super inspiring.

Then last but not least, we've got Ali Abdaal, a brilliant YouTuber with over a million and a half subscribers. You've also got a course called the Part Time YouTuber Academy and you're also a full-time medical student, I believe welcome to the show, Ali.

Ali Abdaal: 1m 432s

Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.

Courtland Allen: 1m 34s

Maybe we'll start there because that's a crazy amount of productivity. I don't think most people could do even one of those things, let alone all three of them. How are you so productive, Ali? How are you doing so much more than everyone else can?

Ali Abdaal: 1m 45s

I mean, it's worth saying that I'm no longer a full-time medical student. I've now become a doctor.

I was working as a doctor for two years while doing all this stuff, and I've kind of taken a break at the moment in intending to travel the world and do medical stuff in Australia, but then the pandemic happened.

Right now, I'm in a bit of a weird place where I'm sort of a productivity guru on the internet, but I don't really have a job other than doing internet stuff. So, it always feels a bit weird, but whenever people ask me about the productivity thing, my main spiel is yeah, a lot of it is around just enjoying the things that you're doing.

Part of that is finding things to work on that you find fun. Like I'm sure you find it fun working on Indie Hackers, but also part of it is sort of choosing to find fun in the things that you end up doing anyway.

A lot of students studying for exams, things like that, you don't really have a choice in the matter, but there are lots of things that we can do to make the process more enjoyable for ourselves. It's like the thing that Naval Ravikant says that, if you find something that feels like play to you and it looks like work to others, then the productivity kind of takes care of itself.

Courtland Allen: 2m 45s

I love that. I've been doing that a lot with Indie Hackers recently. For example, for this podcast, I hired a podcast boss and she's an editor, a producer, she does the notes. She'll sit down with me for two hours a week. I have a call where I prep for episodes.

It's way more fun to do with somebody who's riffing back and forth with me than doing it on my own. It turns this thing where it was pretty fun, but now it's super fun and all the hard parts I've just outsourced and it's like a thousand times better and easier to work on.

Andrew Barry: 3m 14s

Yeah, I was going to say, Ali, you've also got an exceptionally strong team that you've built around you, which when I was working with you and your program, it was quite a joy to witness that. I know that's something sort of near and dear to Marie well. I don't think any of us could do any of this without a really strong team around us.

Courtland Allen: 3m 30s

Marie what's your team like? Because on the outside looking in it's like, this is just Marie, it’s your face. It’s you talking. What's going on behind the scenes?

Marie Poulin: 3m 37s

Yeah, it used to be my husband and I, and then he took on a full-time job about a year and a half ago. So, it kind of went to back to one, but I couldn't do everything myself.

I had an assistant for the last year and a half, and I only just hired her full-time last month. Now it's two of us. I also bring on various contractors and assistant coach, too. I actually stopped doing one-on-one work and now I have an assistant coach who handles all of the one-on-one. That's been amazing.

It's just such a shift in my own focus. Now I can really focus on the stuff I want to focus on, content creation. I don't have to do all the logistics behind the scenes. It's a game changer when you hire that first person.

Courtland Allen: 4m 15s

Walk me through what it is that you do exactly. Because I use Notion religiously. My prep for this podcast, it's all in Notion. I've tried to explain Notion to other people. They have no idea what it is. What's Notion and how does it relate to your coursework exactly?

Marie Poulin: 4m 28s

Yeah. I mean, I use it to manage nearly every aspect of my life and business, everything from tracking the health of my plants to even track the offer that I made to my assistant to become a full-time member. Every piece of my business is managed through Notion.

People call it a productivity platform. It is a lot slower than a lot of other platforms, so that is a big complaint that people have. But I think of it as a place where everything is integrated, I can see everything in one place and that peace of mind of just knowing where all the moving parts can sit and it's one or two clicks away, whether it's data, whether it's creativity, note-taking you name it, it all just kind of lives in this one place.

It just brings so much peace to my brain. I got so stoked about this. I was sharing it with all my friends and colleagues and everything. At some point I was like, okay, there's something here.

I think when the first person said, if you make a course about this, I will give you money. I was like, hhhmm. Okay, look, there's, there's something here. I'm talking about it enough. You know, people are asking questions and stuff.

I decided to do a webinar on it. It took me like three years to get the courage to run a webinar. I was so scared, and I was just so excited, chatting about all the things I'd done with Notion.

It just kind of, honestly, everything kind of exploded from there. The Notion team reached out. They were really curious to chat with me more about collaborating. Business just kind of took things in a totally different direction.

I was like, could I get paid to teach people about this? Is this a thing I could make a living on? It was a risk. I was like, okay, do I want to be known as the Notion girl? I don't know. Let's try it. Let's try it for a season. Let's like, see what happens?

I have so many other skills. I’ve working with online course creators for so long. I was like, let's try it. Shipped a course and then business took a left turn, and I was like, well, okay, that answers my question. Let's make hay while the sun is shining and see what happens. The rest is kind of history.

Courtland Allen: 6m 21s

Yeah, it's fascinating to see what kinds of things, topics, and then sort of focuses you can have to actually make money from a course. Cause it didn't seem like something that you predicted at the beginning.

I think that's where almost every course creator has to start. If you want this to be something that you make a living from, is this even the right topic.

Ali, you have basically, sort of transitioned to teaching people, not just how to be productive, but how to be YouTubers. How much money do you charge for your course? How did you choose the topic?

Ali Abdaal: 6m 48s

At the moment, ours is a sort of a six-week live online course. It's $1,500 for the basic edition, $2,500 for the premium and $5,000 for the executive. That's a lot of money. It was really, really, really scary charging that amount.

I'd done courses in the past where mostly my courses were on Skillshare, which is free basically for people to access with the free trial or like a Netflix-esque subscription. I taught a few courses helping people to get into med school for the sort of $100 price tag but doing a sort of high ticket live online course that was like, yeah, I hadn't, hadn't really done that before.

When I thought of online courses, the model I had in my head was the you pay a few hundred dollars for a course and you watch a series of videos. But I was speaking to two friends, Tiago Forte and David Perrell who run their own live courses which I'd taken.

I was running them through my idea of doing a course for YouTubers, and they said that, look, you should really consider doing it as a live thing because course completion rates for self-paced courses are abysmally low. Basically no one completes them.

You and I have probably signed up to dozens of online courses and just sort of watch maybe one or two videos in them. It's just the model of doing it live seemed interesting. I tried it out sort of late 2020, and it was just so much fun and infinitely easier, actually, to teach a class on Zoom than it is to record a load of prerecorded videos.

We started off a lot cheaper than that, but sort of hiked up the prices over time as the demand increased and it's been really fun.

Courtland Allen: 8m 13s

Tell me about that process because you said your earlier courses were like a hundred dollars. Now your highest tier’s $5,000, you've gone 50 X higher. How do you have the emotional wherewithal to do that? Cause I know people who are afraid to charge $10 for their product that they spent the last year building.

Ali Abdaal: 8m 29s

The thing that kind of sold it for me was speaking to this marketing coach called Billy Bross, who basically said that you need to stop thinking of selling as being something evil. You need to think of selling as being you're doing a service to your customers.

You're doing them a favor by letting them buy from you. As long as you are delivering on the value that they were promised, they will be glad that you offered that service. In a weird way, just changing the mindset to, I am trying to make money off of people and more towards I'm trying to create a transformation for people, and they will be happy to pay for it.

That's made me more okay with charging for it, but still, the first time around we put the cart up, it started off at $400 as our cheapest plan. I was terrified. I was sweating through all of my clothing just before the cart went live. I was just so surprised that people actually bought it.

Every other course creator, I've spoken to says that if you just double your prices, you actually end up with the same number of people. In a weird way, the more someone pays for something, the more invested they are in actually making it work for them.

Weirdly, if I were to charge a hundred dollars for my YouTuber course, so many more people would ask for refunds then if we charge $5,000 for it, and so many fewer people would actually go through the course and find it useful than the higher price tag.

Courtland Allen: 9m 40s

Yeah. I talked to Jordan O'Connor on the podcast, and he had this very interesting story about how he was working so hard to become an indie hacker and learning everything he could.

He used his credit card to pay $2,000 for a course to learn SEO. He was just in debt and it's like, you know what, he actually finished that course and took it and took it really seriously because he spent a lot of money on it. I know that I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on lots of things are really, you know, super cheap and just never finished it.

So, Andrew, I think you're making the right decision to charge $3,000 for the On Deck Course Creators fellowship. The math is cool, too. If you have 111 people paying $3,000, that's $333,000 you've gotten from barely over a hundred people. Compared to people who are charging $5 a month, you know, they need thousands of customers just to be able to pay their salary.

This is what I like about education businesses. You can charge a lot of money. It's super valuable to people that are willing to pay. You're actually helping them, so they're grateful. They don't feel ripped off. You don't have to be some sort of marketing genius who reaches millions of people like Ali's do on YouTube in order to actually cover your costs.

Ali Abdaal: 10m 44s

It's a lot easier to sell one thing for a hundred dollars than a hundred things at $1. The asymmetry in the ease of selling is just completely insane. Also, the sorts of people that pay thousands for an online course are also a lot less likely to need handholding than the sorts of people that pay $10 for an online course.

Courtland Allen: 11m 3s

This is one of the cool things about On Deck. I don't know how to describe On Deck. It's almost like an online college that has all these different, you call them fellowships, podcasting and angel investing and course creation.

One of the coolest things about it is like it's cohort based. So, it's like going to college. You don't just take the course by yourself and do it alone in your room. There's a bunch of other cool, smart, successful people who take the course in the exact same two- or three-month period that you take it. Then half the value isn't even the curriculum. It's just getting to be in the same program with Marie or Ali or whoever else.

Is that a good description of On Deck, Andrew? How does it work?

Andrew Barry: 11m 40s

No, that's well done, Courtland. On Deck started as a community, you know, that's its core. It's probably one of the best out there in terms of offering community that the value of that ecosystem is just it's exponentially growing now with the people and the sort of quantity of people that are getting added to it.

What we are now working on and what I'm specifically focused on with helping some of the other program directors is on layering the educational component to it. Thinking about more of a tighter curriculum that looks at the learning journey. That's actually, the hardest part is the community I think many would agree. So, the fact that they've already nailed that is great, that we can layer in this educational piece that kind of takes it into that online university or Stanford of the internet as it's been called.

Courtland Allen: 12m 24s

I'm going to get all of you guys' opinions on the most important parts of education. Cause you all educate. I spend time educating indirectly through interviewing people like you. I think probably everybody has strong opinions about education.

I remember being in high school and just being so pissed off at the curriculum that we were learning. I had to memorize what date did this hospital burn down? You know what month in 1873, I'm like, why does this matter? Why am I learning this? I could be learning a million better things. You're not teaching me personal finance. You're not teaching me psychology. You're not teaching me about sex or relationships or anything.

So, for me, the curriculum is super big. When you guys think about online education, what do think is important for teaching people effectively?

Ali Abdaal: 13m 2s

One of the things that I often think about is just the information that you're delivering needs to be useful in some way immediately. This student needs to be able to see how they can apply it.

Often this is just the one key difference between the good medical lectures that I've attended and delivered and the bad ones, where the good ones will start off with a scenario. They'll say, all right, five years from now, you're going to graduate. You're going to be a doctor. Let's imagine you're in the emergency department and you, a patient comes in and they've got shortness of breath and cough and chest pain, and they've got this and that.

Then you do an electrocardiogram, and this is what it shows. How would you approach this? And at the start, no one has any idea because they haven't learned that learned the subject yet, but imagining themselves in the shoes five years from now thinking, oh, crap, I need to know the answer to this just makes them pay attention and absorb it in a way where if you just had a lecture on here's, how the heart works or here's how EKG is work, no one would pay attention because it's just not immediately obvious why that might be useful.

The weird thing I found was that when, once I graduated medical school, I now cared a lot more about the knowledge I was getting. In a way, wishing I'd paid more attention in med school because I could now see it being immediately relevant. I just wish more people did that, just making it obvious what the point of something is.

Marie Poulin: 14m 11s

You'd probably agree with this, but framing your modules in terms of outcomes, instead of topics. I think a lot of first-time teachers maybe approach it in terms of, I want to teach X versus what is the student want to be able to do or who do they want to be by the end of this module?

You can think about that at the course level. Who do I want to be by the time I finish this course and who do I want to be by the time I finish this module? You can kind of look at that as a micro or macro thing. So, think of it in terms of action, what should people be able to do by the end of this? And not just like, you're going to learn SEO. It's like, well, what am I actually learning? What do I want to be able to do by the end of this?

Courtland Allen: 14m 44s

I think about that with Indie Hackers podcast episodes, too, where I like to start off episodes talking about, okay, where are you at? You know, Marie, you're making a crazy amount of money or through chorus. Ali, you're completely independent. You have this huge YouTube channel. Also, you've got all these passive income streams, et cetera.

I think once you hear, okay, this is what this person is like, I would like to be there, then suddenly everything they say takes on a lot more importance and you actually care about their advice versus if you just jump straight in and you have no clue how much money this person's making or what their life is like, then it's like, why listen.

Do you share your revenue, numbers, Ali for your courses and stuff?

Ali Abdaal: 15m 17s

It's about $1 per year per subscriber, but 2020 for us, we made about $300,000 from the first cohort of the YouTube Academy and about $500,000 that year from Skillshare, which was weird. I never thought that would be the case. Maybe $200K from brand deals on YouTube and about $150K from AdSense. So, all in all, it was about $1.3 million.

Courtland Allen: 15m 41s

It's a ton. It's very de-risked because you've got multiple income streams. It's not just one thing. It's four or five different things of, you know, YouTube cuts out your ad deal or whatever. Then you're probably still fine.

Ali Abdaal: 15m 52s

My biggest fear at the start of 2020 was oh my God, this business is too reliant on YouTube. Let's start making classes on Skillshare. Now we're too reliant on Skillshare because it makes up half our revenue. Okay. Let's think about how we diversify away from Skillshare. Let's try and do our own course, which is how the YouTube Academy first came to be as a self-hosted kind of live course.

Courtland Allen: 16m 10s

I want to switch gears for a second and talk about the dark side of course creation. There's always posts about this on Indie Hackers because people get kind of tired of seeing how many people are selling their course. I think from the outside looking in, sometimes it can look like it's just a bunch of people, you know, here's how to get big on Twitter. Then that's how you get big on Twitter by selling your course to get big on Twitter. You know, it seems a very circular.

What are all your opinions on, I guess, teacher qualifications? If you go through the sort of traditional educational system and you go to a college, you're getting educated by people who are somewhat qualified to be there. If you're buying online courses, it's really easy to end up on Clubhouse in some scammer room where they're telling you how to make a million dollars next week. And suddenly you've paid, you know, your entire life savings for some scammy course.

Marie Poulin: 16m 54s

Yeah. There’s sort of a buyer beware, right? You kind of have to do your research on who is the person that you're, that you're taking this course from. And there's a difference between how to make $10,000 doing X versus I made $10,000 doing X. Just because you did a thing once doesn't mean that's a framework or a system.

So, I think is there a pattern of success, right? Is there more than one thing to look to? What is this teacher's history? What is their experience? I know I'm not one for official credentials. I don't really care necessarily did someone go to university and get a degree and do whatever, but I want to know what is the output of what they've done, and do I trust that person?

That trust with the teacher, I think happens long before the course is purchased, right? It's like you're following them on Twitter. You're hearing what they say. There's resonance that happens long before. I think resonance is a big, a big thing. You can have 10 different teachers teaching 10 different topics, but the way someone delivers it just really resonates with you and you're like, yes. Okay. I like the way that person delivers that. I want that.

Ali Abdaal: 17m 53s

I think the interesting thing here is that, I mean, a lot of colleges are also quite scummy. You're paying a lot of money; you're going into debt for like hundreds of thousands. What’s the return on that? Is the lecturer actually good?

I went to a pretty good medical school. Cambridge University Medical School is pretty solid. I would say 95% of my lectures were boring and uninteresting. Most of the people I knew, including me, we learned it ourselves from YouTube videos.

I think education as a whole suffers from this problem of you might not know how good it is. At least with online courses broadly, you actually can see testimonials. If you search YouTube, if you search YouTube for review of Notion Mastery or review of the Part Time YouTuber Academy, you will see people creating their own supposedly unbiased reviews about it, which you don't really see, you know, review of Cambridge University Medical School curriculum, 2021. It's not really a thing.

Courtland Allen: 18m 38s

Yeah. I went to MIT. Tuition is $55,000 a year, times four years, an insane amount. I barely went to class. I don't remember what I learned in my classes. I was mostly teaching myself to code by going online to the same websites everybody else was.

There's advantages. It's a cool school. People will respect you more if you have that on your resume, blah, blah, blah. I met some really amazing people but lit didn't really even have to have it curriculum. It was mostly just a socially acceptable stamp to pay a lot of money to get.

Andrew Barry: 19m 7s

Yeah, that's credentialism. The scammy marketers’ online courses actually was so helpful in helping me refine what we were going to do with On Deck Course Creators because it became this perfect counterpoint.

They're so easy to spot, which is great and they make it so easy. You go into Clubhouse rooms and it's a million emojis, rhinos and the bionic arms and all that sort of stuff. It's like, okay, cool. I know exactly what that is about.

For me, the big difference is also, what's great is it's easy to spot from a student's perspective. You can tell if a course is transforming people's lives. It's like Ali was saying, people were just creating long videos. Do you know how much time and effort goes into making a video? They are doing that just to review his course. That means that changed their life. That's the difference I think when you get into the real transformational courses.

The other thing is passion. Everyone here is super passionate about teaching and that drives the transformation. But it's also an energy, like Marie says that you can, you can see and resonate with long before you even take the course.

Courtland Allen: 20m 9s

Another topic here on the dark side of education is are people even finishing these courses? Or if you pay a lot of money for a course, so you're probably more likely to finish it, but is there any sort of guarantee that once you take a course, that it actually helped you, you know, is there any place to leave a review and say, this course sucks for future students?

It seems like there's really no real accountability here. There's some models that are different. For example, Lambda School has these income share agreements where they essentially don't charge you tuition unless you go get a job, which is probably the most accountable you can be for your course changing somebody's lives.

How do you all think about this with your courses? How do you know that people are getting the value that they pay for?

Ali Abdaal: 20m 46s

This is a real struggle. There isn't really a kind of Trustpilot for online courses. A lot of it is reliant on the course creator kind of making information public. Obviously, if we have some students and we do have some students who are, when we ask them how transformational was this course for you, they'll say it's a one out of 10.

We're not gonna publicize that we're not going to sort of put their bad review on the website because we control the website. The thing we do is that we, we've got a meeting about this, like two days from now where my team and I will get together. We look through every single one of our entry and exit survey responses.

We say kind of thank you to the people who rated a 10 out of 10, which is like 70% of people. We spend a lot of time going through the people who rated it less than eight out of 10 thinking, okay, what could we have done differently? How can we improve this for next time? How can we make sure?

With ours and with a lot of these other live courses, there is a kind of money back guarantee where, what we say for us is that if you complete the work, i.e., you do the opening survey, you just put out the six videos a week, the six videos over six weeks that we're asking you to do all we, all we ask is just make one video a week. That is the only thing you have to do. If you still don't find the course valuable email us, and we will give you all of your money back.

I don't think we've, we've not had a single person who's actually done everything, and I'll ask for their money back. We've had people who've said halfway through that our real life got in the way, you know, I got COVID. I couldn't do the course, like, okay, that's fine. Have your money back. We don't want you to want your money in this case.

It does rely on the individual course creators being honest about this, there isn't a Trustpilot for courses.

Andrew Barry: 22m 18s

I'm going to throw in that there potentially is one. Eric Jorgensen is actually working on something called coursecorrectly.com and that's kind of exactly what he's trying to do. So, that's pretty cool, I think. It's going to be so, so valuable for this whole space.

Marie Poulin: 22m 33s

Yeah, I think like Ali said, going through that student feedback, asking the right questions also in your intake. What would you consider a success going through this course? That's really interesting. There's really fun data to look at there.

When people are describing their own intentions for when they finish the course and then an exit survey to see, okay, well, how did that match up? You know, where did, where did we drop the ball? Or what could we do better? I think most people don't realize course design is sort of an iterative, it's never really done.

It's you go through a cohort and you're like, okay, here's all the places where we notice gaps. You're always kind of going back and tweaking and trying to improve it. If you're a great instructor, I think, a lot of people can set it and forget it.

But I also want to play a little bit of devil's advocate, too, in that I don't think necessarily course completion is the best measure of course success. I'll say this as someone who, I take a ton of courses, I've always taken courses online. That's where all my money in business, I'm just like, always like, what's the a shortcut, right? Where can I learn from all these amazing people who've been there before?

Often, I'll get what I need in the first couple of modules and I'm like, awesome. Got my value out of the course. I'm good to go. I'm happy. I'm really happy even just that one nugget that just made it worth it was like, that was awesome.

So, you might never see, those instructors might not ever see anything from me and might not know that that piece of content or that delivery, that workshop changed something in my business, and I went off and I was super happy.

There aren't always mechanisms for that feedback to get surfaced. So, I don't think completion necessarily is always the best measure. It's those outcomes like, how do we know that students are actually applying that knowledge out in the real world?

That's a little bit harder to measure. There’s ways you can do that with the exit surveys and stuff like that, and reporting back, doing those focus groups and stuff.

Courtland Allen: 24m 19s

In a way, that's what the Indie Hackers Podcast is. Let me find indie hackers who are crushing it, bring them on and publicize those stories as widely as possible.

It's funny because often people are like, I don't want to hear the success stories. I want to hear the failure stories, give me the nitty gritty. A lot of people have tried to start these sites that are just failure stories and you can't name any of them because no one actually wants to read a bunch of failure stories. It's not inspiring. You don't actually learn as much as you would think. I think the success stories are a much better sort of strategy to share.

Marie Poulin: 24m 49s

Or it's interesting to learn the challenges and failures from the people who've hit a certain level of success. You're like, where did you go wrong? I want to know that, but I want to know from someone who's made it right.

Courtland Allen: 24m 59s

Where have you gone wrong, Marie?

Marie Poulin: 25m 1s

Where have I gone wrong? I mean, there's so many places. When I first launched the course, for example, there was no content finished. It was a total, total pilot, total beta.

I'm actually a huge fan of always, even if you're going to do an evergreen course, always launch it in a beta pilot first. Always, always. You need that student feedback. A course is never going to look like what you think it looks in your head. As soon as you put it out into the wild, it takes on a whole different shape. So, I think that's really, really important.

But I think one of the things that was so hard and having launched the course inside of Notion, you can move data around, you can move stuff. I was very clear that it was a beta, but I think some folks that would have benefited more from a very structured linear process came in and it's like, we had contents changing and adding new modules.

There were people who were excited to be part of that building. There were other people that were like, whoa, it was overwhelming. It was too much. It's just part of the learning process. I'm like, yeah. Okay. Not everybody was maybe the best fit for, for a total pilot like that. But you just, you learn, and you just keep, keep adapting and iterating.

Courtland Allen: 26m 6s

Yeah. I talked to Tara Reed who has a cool course teaching people to build apps without code and her first thing, I think she gave a talk. A few people in the audience were like, hey, can you teach us to do that? And she's like, for a thousand dollars. And they're like, sure.

It was just a super impromptu fly by the seat of her pants, just figure it out. And then after that, I think it was 50 or a hundred people were like, we want to learn that. Of course, there's now a little bit better, but still super beta.

That's the cool thing about teaching. You can just, I could create a course tomorrow. I could just jump in and say, who wants to be part of my course. Probably a few hundred people would sign up and fly by the seat of my pants. No one's going to die. People might ask for refunds; I'll happily give refunds. And then I also won’t put their negative testimonials on the way, but it's super easy to just get, to get started that way.

Andrew Barry: 26m 50s

So, I have this theory that everyone has an online course in them. If you are helping people in a repeatable way, and you've done that a few times already, and that could be coaching, consulting, it could be a service business. It could be, you know, so many different ways. Then the only thing separating you from teaching or scaling your impact is learning how to teach on the internet.

That's a skill. You can totally learn how to do that and get better at it. Better. Like everyone said, it's an iterative process.

Courtland Allen: 27m 18s

What do you think is the most important thing to teach course creators, Andrew, because you're running the Course Creators Fellowship. It's very meta. You've got a course basically teaching all these course creators how to make courses and your students slash members are pretty great.

Like Maria and Ali, you guys could be teaching and yet you're part of the fellowship learning. Andrew, what are you teaching all these amazing course creators?

Andrew Barry: 27m 40s

Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, I recognize that there is no, like I'm not the guru who's going to teach you how to create the perfect course. I'm going to give as much in terms of guidance and frameworks and ideas for thinking about your course.

I was talking to a guy earlier today, whose course is a bunch of sort of guides on a website and they’re super multimedia with audio versions and videos and stuff. He was like, is this a course? I'm like, yeah, absolutely. It is a course. Totally.

That's the beauty of it. Marie and I talk about this all the time. There’s such a massive spectrum of what a course can be.

First of all, people, it's about breaking that, it doesn't have to be a code-based course. It doesn't have to be a bunch of videos on Teachable. There's just a million different ways of content delivery.

I think what's more important, before you even get into content delivery, what platform you're going to use, all that sort of stuff is nailing three P’s, which is how do you connect with the personal meaning of every student coming in?

So, it's not about you saying, this is what you need, but it's about you saying, I know what you want, and you want, and you want, this is how I’m going to connect you with what I think you need.

Then peer-to-peer learning, which we talked about. The power of the community and then the prompts to action, like doing Ali’s six videos that you go at, that's where you learn the most, not from, as amazing as Ali is in delivering his sessions, but you got to learn so much more just getting a video done and then it's writing and doing it again next week and next week.

If you get those three P’s - personal meaning, peer-to-peer learning, and then prompts to action, that's sort of the building blocks for great teaching,

Marie Poulin: 29m 17s

Related to that, Andrew, the way you've got those three P's that are really memorable, I think every course creator in a way can ask to distill their content into, here's a memorable framework that you're going to come away with.

I think that's the hardest thing to do sometimes is to give your course that structure, when it can feel like a medley of information, it's like, how do we give this, what's my unique framework. That can be, I think one of the biggest challenges to do.

Andrew Barry: 29m 41s

That's the creation part of this. That's quite hard. Ali’s got some amazing one. What are your, some of the frameworks just crack me up.

Ali Abdaal: 29m 52s

We've got the bird song technique.

Courtland Allen: 29m 55s

What's the bird song technique.

Ali Abdaal: 29m 58s

The bird song technique is a way of never running out of ideas for content. The theory being that if you're a normal person and you listen to bird song, you think, oh, it’s some bird singing, but if you're the sort of nerd who understands what bird song is and what bird it is, it suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

It's like, you've unlocked this part of your brain that can distinguish between a Sparrow and a Robin and a Nightingale, and I don’t know any other bird types to name. Similarly, when it comes to content creation, when you become a creator and your mindset shifts from being a consumer to a creator, suddenly you start seeing content ideas while you're scrolling through Twitter on the toilet.

More than half of my YouTube videos that were video ideas have come in the last four years from me just being on the toilet, scrolling through Twitter going, oh, you know, that's a really interesting tweet that Courtland’s just posted. I wonder if I can make a video kind of touching on that thing when he kind of talks about this thing or, oh, Naval’s just posted something interesting. I actually have some thoughts on that. Let's make a video about it.

It's a bit of a stupid name, the bird song technique, but it just makes it seem more memorable and in a way more legit than just saying guys, scroll through Twitter while you're on the toilet to come up with content ideas.

Courtland Allen: 30m 59s

Yeah. I love it.

Marie Poulin: 31m 2s

Naming and framing, right?

Courtland Allen: 31m 3s

Marie, what do you think is the most valuable thing that you teach in your courses on Notion Mastery?

Marie Poulin: 31m 8s

I think what has been really interesting is initially it started as I'm teaching you how to use this tool, you know? People want it, how the heck do I, what's the quickest way to learn this tool. But the idea is it's what the tool allows you to do that's more interesting.

People have come in and they said, I expected to learn about Notion, but it was more a how to live your life better. I was like, that's kind of interesting. I think because maybe I share so much of my own applications, people see my own workspace all the time. I'm like, here's how I do task management. Here's how I think about managing my plants.

So, they're seeing all these different pockets of my life and I think it's giving them ideas for how to apply it in their own life. I can't teach you about managing your tasks in Notion if you don't actually know how to prioritize your own pillars of your own life.

So, inevitably I had to keep layering on these we have to talk about habits. We have to talk about that. So, it just became bigger and bigger over time. I was like, where do we cut this off? How big does this become?

I think some of those elements people weren't expecting to learn about, but they're kind of necessary because you're not just going to switch from one tool to another and think suddenly all of your prioritization problems are going to be fixed.

There's the technical piece, but there's also habit-building pieces when you're learning to manage this stuff. So, it's new organizational habits. It's interesting how you start making a course, you might have an intention of where it's going to go. As you create the content and as students engage with it, you're like, this is something a little bit different or, actually, maybe there's three courses in here.

Even Ali and I were talking about this because he's going to have beginners, intermediate, he's got advanced people. You're going to have people at all different levels with different intentions.

I think certainly with Notion, it's like, we have people who've never touched the tool before, but like saw a video and bought it. Then we have people who are super advanced, been using it for two years. People that are managing their businesses out of it. People are running a farm and a winery. I'm like, how do I contain this when the intention is so different for all of these different students.

I think that was the hardest challenge for me is what's core curriculum and what is really fun rabbit holes you can go down. These branches of well everyone's on this track, but there's going to be some people who are going to want to go deeper.

Courtland Allen: 33m 21s

Probably the number one question that every indie hacker has for every successful indie hacker is how did you get started? Because all of you are pretty advanced. You've got hundreds of people taking On Deck. You're making hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars from your courses.

Let's say you’re a total newbie. You have no idea what it is you can even teach. You've got no online audience. No one knows who you are. You have very few skills. How do you take the first step to become a course creator?

Ali Abdaal: 33m 47s

I think every, everyone does have something to teach. Actually, I keep a copy of Austin Kleon’s book “Show your work!” being my favorite one on my desk at all times, because this is the book which takes five minutes to read basically. It's so short and pamphlet-like.

This is a book that, one of the books, that most changed my life because when five years ago now in 2016, when I first read it, before that point, I was very scared of putting myself out there online. I'd been thinking maybe I should start a blog. And I just never really got around to it. Cause I thought, you know, people are going to think I'm an arrogant, whatever for having the audacity to have my own website, like, come on, who the hell does that.

I read “Show your work!” and his point is that everyone has something to teach. Even if you're not teaching, just documenting your learning of something is actually a value add to other people are trying to learn the same thing.

He talks about CS Lewis's phrase, I think, “the curse of the expert,” where being a guru in something, being an expert is actually not necessarily the best way to teach a beginner because you probably have forgotten what the actual struggles of a beginner are.

So, when I read that book that like completely changed my whole perspective on this stuff. I started thinking, okay, I'm going to start writing stuff online about my journey through entrepreneurship, because I'd been doing like the attempting to do the indie hacker thing for like 10 years at that point and trying to learn to code, trying to build my own businesses, et cetera.

Then when I started my YouTube channel, it was a case of, okay, I'm in medical school. Why don't I just share what it's like being in med school and what it took to get in just share my thoughts on this. Cause I thought I was reasonable at teaching and just this thing of.

The way I think of it is what can you teach to someone who is three years younger than you, but who is you in every other way? What could you teach to yourself three years ago and anyone asking themselves that question will have answers to that? Like three years ago, I wish I would've known this, or, three years ago I was trying to learn how to code and I just, then I discovered Code Academy and here's how I learned and being able to document that through something on the internet for free.

So, a blog or a YouTube channel, I think that would be the first place to start. Certainly, that's how I got my start with online education.

Courtland Allen: 35m 53s

I love that you're not discouraged by the fact that people might already be teaching this. You learned how to code. Guess what? There's lots of ways teach you how to code. You shouldn't be discouraged.

Marie, you're teaching people Notion Mastery. There's a lot. Notion itself has guides for how to use Notion. Yet you're still able to have this course. With Indie Hackers people had websites and interviews and books about how to start companies well before this. That's one of the beautiful things about course creation is you don't necessarily have to be discouraged because someone's already doing what you want to teach.

Marie Poulin: 36m 21s

It comes back to that resonance thing, right? Different teachers have different teaching styles, different delivery mechanisms, different ways of phrasing, the same thing. You can hear the same thing 10 times, but you're like, ah, just the way they put that into words was like, yes!

Or the written word versus video, right? Some people are much stronger on video versus the written word or amazing tweet storms or something like that. We have to remember that we're going to create resonance in a different way and just keep adding to your experience bucket. Over time, people are just going to be like, whoa, that journey is so interesting, I really want to learn from that person.

Andrew Barry: 36m 53s

This is something anybody can do. Actually, when I first started my business five or six years ago now, I was sort of in this frame of mind coming out of the corporate world where I was like, I need to pretend to be a lot bigger than I am.

I was always saying we to clients and it was just me. It worked, but I had a very slow growth trajectory in those early days. Then fast forward to this past year, I probably in August had like 300 followers on Twitter, you know, didn't take it seriously on Twitter at all.

But I started realizing, okay, I've been doing this online course thing, but in a corporate environment for 15 years, I had a lot of experience there that was now I started, I basically started picking apart what online course creators are doing and sort of like, this is what really worked well with Write of Passage, for example.

That type of stuff just started resonating with people on Twitter. I had this crazy growth curve from August until December when Erik Torenberg reached out. Well, actually before that actually when Ali reached out and also Marie and I started becoming friends these folks who, obviously like quite frankly, didn't know I existed before August.

It sounds like that's the valuable thing is just learn in public. Share that stuff and don't sort of keep it behind closed doors and pretend that you're bigger than you are because it really does pay off.

Courtland Allen: 38m 15s

So, in a way it's like you weren’t even necessarily having to do the brilliant stuff. You were putting in the work to figure out how other people who are successful are doing it and then you would share it personally and say, here's my dissection of why this course works well. You're just doing it from your personal Twitter account, which kind of conferred to you a bunch of expertise because no one else is really analyzing the stuff and breaking it down.

Andrew Barry: 38m 36s

Yeah. That's exactly right.

Courtland Allen: 38m 38s

Very cool.

Marie Poulin: 38m 39s

Yeah. I mean, I agree with you, you guys that learning publicly is so huge. Not doing that work in secret, whatever you're learning, whatever work you are doing. I think the people that I've seen struggle the most are ones that have operated behind the scenes.

They're doing all this work. They're working with clients, but there's no evidence of their work anywhere. I'm like, well, where's your, there's no YouTube videos. You've got some Instagram stories which are ephemeral and disappear, right? They're almost choosing these channels where there isn't, there's no SEO, there's no way to find their work.

You've got to be kind of find-able and I think again, Twitter has just enabled so much conversation. It's so easy to meet interesting people. If I think Andrew's interesting and I'm seeing him interact with Ali and then someone else interesting replies, I'm like, you're going down these deep dives and meeting these really cool, interesting people who maybe think, like you, but also have a really different and interesting perspective, too.

I think courage is a big part of it. Just a willingness to put yourself out there, even if you don't feel like an expert yet is huge. I'm a huge believer in that. Whether it's a blog that you don't think anybody's watching yet, setting up those email newsletters, even if you've only got five subscribers.

You just have to start somewhere, and that resonance starts really slow, but that ripple effect and that compound interest of that 1% that you do every day, every week, whatever, even if you shipped a video a month over two years, five years, the results of that are going to be so much bigger than if you just didn't take any action at all and you're just kind of secretly working on your skills.

Work on your skills in public, share what you're working on, share your opinions. And you're going to find your people over time, but you got to put in the work

Andrew Barry: 40m 13s

You don't have to have it figured out to begin with that's the other thing, right?

It's such a paralyzing thing for a lot of people, for me included, and I remember when I first started sharing stuff online, I was like, this is how to create an online or not an online course, like a course for companies, you know, like no one cared about that on Twitter. It wasn’t until I started talking about what course creators are doing, that that's sort of sort of resonating.

I have to go back and look at a whole bunch of tweets that it would just like into the void. No one was reading.

Marie Poulin: 40m 42s

I was reading and I think sharing that here's what I'm thinking about X versus here's how to do X. I think you can just share what you're here's what I'm thinking about. Or here's something I've noticed, right? I've worked with a number of clients and I keep seeing why, show that you are recognizing patterns and that you're seeing certain trends, even if you're again, a beginner, but just sharing that thinking is what is going to start to put those, that resonance out there.

Courtland Allen: 41m 10s

I love that just slight twisting of the phrase. Cause if you're a perfectionist or you're someone who's got a lot of anxiety about how people would perceive you. Well, if you phrase things as here's how to do X, you've now raised the bar tremendously on what you need to share and you're gonna be paralyzed because you can't live up to that.

Also, to Andrew's point about just putting out content and tweaking, the cool thing about being a YouTuber or Twitter or a podcaster or a blogger is most people aren't even gonna look at your early stuff. No one's scrolling on your Twitter timeline to see what you were tweeting a bunch of years ago. Just put out there, see how it resonates and ideally don't lock yourself into one plan right at the beginning.

If you have a podcast, your podcast should change over time and it should get better and better over time. It doesn't matter if you start off pretty crappy. It's another easy way I think, to get started by giving yourself some leeway to not have to start with perfection.

Marie Poulin: 41m 58s

I don't know how many years ago it was, but I was just terrified to be on video. I never wanted to do client calls or anything. I was like, let's operate by email. I was really, really afraid of being visible in any way, shape or form, but I knew that was going to hold me back in business.

I think I started with a hundred-day project. I don't know if you've heard about it, but you pick one thing to do every day for a hundred days. I did a video blog. I posted those to YouTube. I posted them on Instagram, and I left them up because they are awkward AF.

I wanted people to see this is a learnable skill. You can learn to speak on stage. You can learn to get comfortable on video. Seems like it's a lot easier for some people than others, for sure. And people are like, oh, but you seem so comfortable. I'm like, oh my gosh, I've hired speaking coaches. I've done these crazy challenges. I’ve signed up for acting classes.

You name it, I have done everything because I knew this was a skill I needed to work on. I wanted people to know that. I wanted them to know it's not just that there are people that are very comfortable and they're just naturally amazing on stage and there's the rest of us. These are skills that we can learn.

I wanted people to be able to see that trajectory. I get notes from people all the time being like, I went back and watched video one, or I watched video 14. I'm like, oh, it's cringy. But it needs to, it needs to be there for people as a reminder that we are all on a journey. We are progressing at our own pace and there's room for everybody to improve, whatever that looks like for you.

Courtland Allen: 43m 23s

So I want to try an abstract question here to sort of close this out. I'm curious, what mental models, what philosophies, what ideas do you all have that drive your work in life? It doesn't have to be related to course creation. It could just be any sort of broad idea.

I'll start just as an example, I really liked this idea from Charlie Munger about having a sort of lattice work of higher level ideas that you can hang specific things on. The way he describes it is it's really hard to remember a hundred little facts. But it's easier to remember a small number of facts from which you can derive other things. So, if I think about a business, for example, I just think of four words. Like, what problem is it solving? What’s the distribution channel? What's the business model? What's the product?

From those four words, I can basically create like a thousand little questions for each one of those that'll help me analyze the business. I don't have to remember a whole bunch of different stuff. So, I try to take that with me to every part of life and I find it to be super useful.

What models do you all have? What are the things you've learned or read that have really stuck with you?

Andrew Barry: 44m 18s

So, it's funny. I think my one is sort of also in this space a little bit. I’ve been thinking a lot about destination and journey groups and sort of applying that to my own personal life as well. I'm constantly kind of going between action, action, action, and sort of alignment with where I'm headed.

That's something I've only started doing more intentionally this year, at the end of last year, start of this year. As things just start to get so much busier, and now I'm basically running two companies, I’ve got a one-year-old kid, I just have to do this. And just so that you know, that when you are executing, executing, executing you are actually on the path that you want to be on and it's aligned with what you want to be.

So, the journey, you are clear what the destination is, and then you just focus on the journey and sort of all the things that come with that, bringing people in, making relationships and all that sort of stuff.

Courtland Allen: 45m 4s

Shaan Puri has a good idea called know your ABZ's. A, where you are; B, your next step; and Z, where you want to end up. If you sort of lose sight of any of those, you might end up way off path.

Ali Abdaal: 45m 15s

My whole mental model for things is just trying to enjoy the journey as much as possible. If I find that I'm not having fun doing anything, then not everything can be fun 100% of the time, but if it's very not fun for an extended amount of time, then usually there's a sign that something is wrong.

Either it's a destination that's not meaningful to me, or more likely I'm kind of approaching it, I'm choosing to approach it in a way that it's just not conducive to having fun. In particular, one thing that I'm very bullish on is setting input goals rather than outcome goals. Input goals, meaning I'm just going to make two videos a week. Outcome goal being, I want to get X number of subscribers.

I'm in the process of writing a book at the moment and I really want it to hit the New York Times bestseller list. But anytime I think about it, it just gets so depressing, and I hate the thought of writing the book, whereas I try and rewire my brain to think, nope, not going to care about that. If it happens, it'll happen, but otherwise, you know, the thing I'm going to care about is I want to write a book that I'm proud of, which is an input goal. It's in my control.

That just helps me enjoy the journey rather than being fixated on the destination.

Courtland Allen: 46m 21s

I love it. Well Ali, Andrew Marie, thank you for coming on the show, dropping some gems about course creation. I would love for you to let the audience know where they can go to find out more about the courses you're working on, about the On Deck Course Creation Fellowship. Andrew, maybe you wanna start.

Andrew Barry: 46m 35s

If you go to beondeck.com, in the top menu, you can find course creators. We've actually closed, depending on when this is released, we’re closed now for the first cohort, but we'll been running two or three cohorts a year. People can get on the wait list there.

If you want to talk to me specifically about it on Twitter @Bazzaruto. I love getting DMs from people who are passionate teachers and course creators and I answer all of them. So, that's the best place.

Marie Poulin: 47m 5s

You can find me online at mariepoulin.com or if you're curious about the course, Notionmastery.com. Pretty active on Twitter or Instagram or YouTube, if you're looking for a Notion-related content, so you can pretty much Google my name. I've got all the handles.

Ali Abdaal: 47m 21s

Same for me, if you just Google my name, Ali Abdaal, you'll find a website or YouTube channel. And through there you'll find links to the Part Time YouTuber Academy. If you're interested in signing up our next cohort’s, probably going to be in like June. So, June 2021. So, depending on when you're watching this, I would love to have you

Courtland Allen: 47m 30s

All right. Thanks everybody.