Creating an online course?

Hey Caleb!

I created the Sales for Founders course - teaching founders everything they need to know about sales to get from $0-10k in MRR.

I actually talked to Courtland on the IH podcast a few months ago about my process and how I created the course and made tens of thousands of dollars in presales.

Here's a link to the episode: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/123-quick-chat-with-louis-nicholls

Happy to answer any questions!

You can check what @dvassallo did https://danielvassallo.com/. It's not technically a course, but a book. I don't know how he validated the idea, perhaps he already knew there was a market for it because of his background. I know he built the audience through Twitter over time and with patience.

You also have The Flask Mega Tutorial, which was validated through a Kickstarter Campaign, which is a mix of text+video. However, the author already had some traction, since he had a book about Flask on O'Reilly.

To be honest, I am also into building courses (not online though), and every time I think about jumping into producing online content, I struggle with validating the idea, I don't want to waste countless hours of my time trying to deliver a product no one wants. I feel that non-beginners tutorials are harder to sell (people tend to find their way around without paying for a course), and beginners tutorials have plenty of competition.

Hope to learn a thing or two from this thread!

I created 3 courses on DIY career development so think self-authored resumes, LinkedIn Profiles and interview preparation.

More details can be found here: courses.weisisheng.cn or courses.weisisheng.com

What format? Mailchimp Drip Email

How long did it take to create?

Probably about 20 hours per course for version 1.0 as I got familiar with Mailchimp. Paul Jarvis' course on Mailchimp is gold as a roadmap.

How did you test the market?

Since I offer premium full service editing through my agency, many clients in mainland China can not afford me (although our overall clientele is global). So these courses fill a need in the middle market. Plus I got tired of answering fundamental questions repeatedly. The testing was more a collection of observations before creating it.

What “extras” did you add to the core to increase the value?

Resume templates, mini-tutorials for various processes on LinkedIn. From time to time, I have offered deals with discounts on future services or specific full service offerings for those who took the courses and still did not have the time or energy to do their own.

I will revise the courses in the next month or so since my target audience prefers more numerous, shorter lessons even if it means 20-30 emails. I was under mistaken impression more meaty, less lessons but long form, was a better sell and way to absorb. Live and learn.

Not exactly written content course, but I have written a test preparation book ten years ago and it's still generating royalties today. (this thing: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/30-day-gmat-success)

• Format: paperback (print on demand, international edition published by a publisher) and ebooks (kindle, apple ibooks...etc.)
• Time: It took me about two years to write on the side
• Testing: I created landing pages, bought ads driving traffic to it, and tracked clicks
• Extras: I released a few free books with additional content but they didn't really help with marketing. What worked however was improving the book a couple of times (now in it's third edition).

Hi Caleb,

I started building https://m.academy last year to teach programming in Magento, and launched my first paid course in December with https://m.academy/p/magento-2-coding-kickstart

The format was initially written, but I changed it to pure video lessons as that seemed to be what everyone wanted, and I believe people find more value in recorded content versus written words.

The creation of the course took a long time (250+ hours), but that was because I had a hard time getting the initial curriculum material together. A majority of my work was in editing the screencasts, it's a very large hidden time sink that just takes a long time to do correctly. I have previous experience creating screencasts for Egghead.io, but there is no way to get around the sheer amount of time & effort it takes to create a course in it's entirety.

I launched a free course in April to teach those about Magento and Docker https://m.academy/p/setup-magento-2-development-environment-docker -- it went a lot quicker than my Coding Kickstart course. It had great traction right away, and continues to get lots of daily signups to this day. I had a lot of people asking me to create other courses, so that was a signal to me that I was onto something. The initial launch was fairly slow, but met all of my targets after the initial launch was over. I gave away some free preview lessons to get potential buyers familiar with my style & delivery. I didn't give away any extras with the course, but I did post a lot of free material to twitter, my email list, and linkedin along the way.

Building an email list is absolutely essential and something you need to start from day zero. Build something for free and give it away in exchange for their email. You want to build trust over time, so that when it comes time to sell something, people are familiar with you and know that you are going to deliver on what you promise.

It's a ton of work, but I highly recommend courses! If you find a niche you can absolutely be successful and have a great base to build on.