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How I built my entire online course in just 5 weeks

This week, I put the finishing touches on my new course, Podcast Like The Pros.

It's a total of 36 lesson and 5 hours of content to help people produce a high-quality, professional-sounding show with a small team or a small budget.

It wasn't my first rodeo making an online course. I've produced 7 courses in partnership with LinkedIn Learning, and three independent courses inside of Freelancing School.

But this course was different for a few reasons:

  • I presold this product before making anything (40+ preoders!)
  • It was independently recorded and edited
  • I used new software for making it
  • I produced it in about 5 weeks total from beginning to end

For comparison, it took me six months to independently produce my Freelancing School courses...woof.

So I wanted to hit the highlights of how I produced Podcast Like The Pros in such a short amount of time, while also really raising the bar on the overall production quality inside of the course.

The Presale

I get a lot of questions about how I produce Creative Elements. I put a lot of time and love into that show on the production side, and it shows through. Just look at this endorsement from this week's guest, David Perell, in his newsletter:

David Perell on Creative Elements

So, I decided to test the waters on exactly how much interest was out there, and if people would be willing to invest in learning this process from me, or if they just wanted to endlessly "pick my brain" for free.

The strategy was really simple:

  1. Put up a course presale landing page
  2. Email my subscribers about it

In my Freelancing School course launch, I put a ton of time into the "launch strategy." I followed the playbook of a certain "open cart" date...a "warm up" series...and more.

It felt really contrived and just...not me.

So, I wanted to do this one differently. I was going to do it simply and I was going to do it honestly.

Instead of a full series, I sent one email introducing exactly what the course was and why I was considering it. I offered a presale discount of 50% off, and I was very honest in the fact that if I didn't get 10 presales by Nov. 1, I wouldn't even make it.

I did add the presale into the "PS" of another email, and sent one last nudge the day before Nov. 1.

Within a few days, I easily crossed the 10-presale mark, which meant that I was committed to building the course.

Note: I used Teachable for this course because it's tied to my jayclouse.com domain. I actually prefer Podia, but it's tied to my freelancing.school domain.

Course Production Overview

In order to write a compelling sales page, I had already thought through the curriculum of the course. And I used the same method that I did with my Freelancing School courses, except instead of a Google Sheet I used a Notion table.

My Notion Workspace

Super simple:

  1. Start with your video title/learning objective
  2. Categorize the videos into Chapters and Lesson Numbers
  3. Add a Status column (Not started / In progress / Recorded / In editing / Edited / Complete)
  4. Plan attachments or lesson notes
  5. Plan an assignment for some/all lessons

And I want to really call out that you should think of each lesson as having ONE specific learning objective. This is something I learned from my work at LinkedIn Learning. Even if there are multiple ways to support that learning objective, each lesson should have one clear goal that's obvious from the title.

The great thing about Notion is that I could then also treat each "Video Title" entry as a Page; by clicking into that page, I could take notes (like a lesson outline) and use that to work from in each lesson.

​I like to have some visual element of each lesson. I don't think that direct-to-camera is the ideal learning format for most learners without showing some hands-on screen capture or at least key points laid out on slides.

​Thankfully, I'd already created a presentation for Creative Mornings that had several lessons worth of content in it and was easy to build from.

Lesson Recording

In my previous courses, I recorded each lesson using the Pro Version of Loom. (Pro tip: if you plan far enough ahead, you can probably fit your whole lesson recording sessions inside the Loom Pro Free Trial!)

​It's a beautiful, easy solution. But it's limited – Loom has some preset video sizes and settings.

​I wanted to go a step beyond with the production quality of this course. So, I used this as a project to learn ScreenFlow.

​ScreenFlow rules, especially if you learn how to setup Templates ahead of time. But basically, it will record HD-quality video from your camera (I have a Canon EOS M50) while also capture HD-quality screencapture and your auxillary audio equipment (my podcasting mic).

​So the end result is super high-quality audio and video.

​Plus ScreenFlow has all these fun little capabilities to make smooth transitions between screencapture and video, like this:

Podcast Like The Pros gif

So I have the ability to really record and highlight certain actions I'm taking on the screen, while also jumping in to add specific context.

Video Editing

The recording was actually pretty easy, because I knew that I would be investing time into the edit. Which meant that I could record long takes, pause, start things over, etc. and I would clean it up in the edit. So step one was just making sure I got all the content recorded, knowing that Editing Jay had his work cut out for him.

Note: The full raw recordings for this course came out to be about 225 GBs of data. External hard drives help.

Once you learn ScreenFlow, it's really not challenging to edit the videos, it just takes time. Just like podcasting, listening through in real time, making smart cuts, only including the stuff that's really good...

I put in probably 40 hours total in editing what came out to be a 5-hour course.

WARNING: Exporting videos from ScreenFlow can take a long time. Luckily, they have a "Batch Export" feature that can run throughout the night. Unluckily, my export had some issues and I ended up exporting 2.5 times. About 8GB of files in the end.

Final Touches

I actually delivered this course a day later than promised (final reveal on Dec. 2 instead of Dec. 1) mainly because I had an issue with my opening video animation.

I decided it would be a nice touch to add a short animated intro to the beginning of each lesson video. I thought it would feel more legit, and so I went looking for an animator.

I started with Fiverr and a guy who would do it for $30-50. He did it. I didn't love it. And that put me behind.

So I found another animator referred by a friend of mine.

Podcast Like The Pros course animation

I love this, because it's not only a great intro to the videos, but I made this gif (which is super portable) and it became the course thumbnail, instead of the trash I put together in Photoshop.

​And finally, after each lesson was uploaded to Teachable, I added notes to each lesson including links to the products or websites referenced and even a course assessment at the end.

Conclusion

This course is arguably the best thing that I've ever made, despite doing it in such a short period of time. It's massive – 36 lessons and 5 hours of highly-edited content. It's pretty exhaustive.

​For me as a creator, it's been an incredibly encouraging project. I was hopeful for 10 presales, but more than 40 people have enrolled in the course already – all from this email list and my Twitter.

​I will probably go this presale strategy for every product I create from here on out. Some ideas probably will fail to reach the threshold, and that's OK! Better to know that before making it.

Learn more here or preview one of the lessons here

Hopefully this provides some inspiration for some folks out there!

  1. 2

    Great write up! Creating a course of this size in 5 weeks is very impressive, congrats. I really like the preorder approach you took - nice accountability hook.

    I thought it was interesting that you created this with teachable but you also said you prefer Podia - could you talk about that a little bit - what do you prefer?

    1. 1

      Basically I like Podia's UI better (both as the creator and as a student). It's also a little bit cheaper.

      Teachable, however, has a better checkout in my opinion.

  2. 2

    @jayclouse Really nice story and congrats for the success. Also it was nice that you shared all the tools you used

    1. 1

      Glad you enjoyed it!

  3. 2

    Jay, I was wondering if you have any experience with iMovie and could compare it to ScreenFlow? If not no worries, just curious about the productivity differences...

    1. 2

      ScreenFlow was sooo much easier for me to use and to make things look GOOD. The way Screenflow lets you do animations is so easy to learn. I've had so many issues with iMovie over the years, but I'm also a rookie with this stuff.

      1. 1

        Thanks Jay 🙏 I too have been using iMovie for too long, used to use Camtasia and bigger pro tools too, but...am looking to try something new. Have only heard good things about ScreenFlow. Will most likely give it a try.

        For switching from iMovie to ScreenFlow specifically, did you just jump in (what I normally do) or can you recommend any helpful resources?

        1. 2

          ScreenFlow has great tutorials, and so does YouTube!

  4. 2

    Jay, thnx for sharing! Super practical.

  5. 2

    Congrats on the successful course! I’m in the process of making my first course as well. I’m going to be following your pattern closely for this. Thank you 🙏

    1. 1

      Glad you found some inspiration from it, @yaroslawbagriy!

  6. 2

    fantastic! what a wonderful overview!

    i'm sharing this in my newsletter tomorrow!

  7. 2

    Thanks for sharing Jay! Curious, what was the break down between Twitter & Email list for paid pre-sales?

    1. 2

      Thanks! I don't have perfect data here, but from what I can tell, its 80-90% Email List.

  8. 2

    Wow! Thanks for sharing your story. It sounds like you were in a very productive flow during those 5 weeks, what an amazing feeling that must be! I just want to congratulate you on finishing this. Congratulations!

    1. 1

      Thanks so much! I definitely batched into into a few productive periods. I basically knocked out all the recording over the course of 3-4 very full days, and very similarly I knocked out most of the recording over 3-4 long days too.

      Much of the time went into prep up front.

  9. 1

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