Lessons from 165+ IndieHackers Posts about Online Courses

I have a few years of experience teaching in-person, but as I prepared to create an online course for the first time, I needed some guidance. Luckily, there are hundreds/thousands of bright people here on IndieHackers to learn from.

Below you'll find a summary of my notes from reading literally every post (and every comment) in the Course Creators group here on IndieHackers. Topics include How to Develop a Great Course, Educational Modules, Promoting Your Course, Tech Stacks, and more.

If I missed anything (or if you've created something other Course Creators would benefit from), please let me know in the comments and I'll edit the post accordingly.

HOW TO DEVELOP A GREAT COURSE:

• @brianhsugreen talks about the important of starting with outcomes (i.e. what students should be able to do after the course). Clearly defined learning objectives for the course as a whole, as well as each individual module, are incredibly clarifying and will help you edit your course to the most value-adding content.
• 5 Questions to Ask to Create a Course
  • Who would find this most valuable?
  • What will they use your course to accomplish?
  • What do they need to know in order to accomplish their goals? (i.e. what is your content outline)
  • What will your curriculum consist of? (i.e. which teaching elements from above will you use)
  • What else exists in your space, and how are you different?
• Customer Research
  • @melvyndotme stresses the important of interview your target user/student to clearly understand their pain points (note: if you're interested in learning how to do this, sign up for my course!)
  • @yzhang used 3 ideal students during the content development stage, including on topic generation, story development, dry runs of storyboards, etc
  • Excellent advice from @erroltiozon
    • Start by doing surveys of people in FB groups, Indiehackers, Twitter, etc. Ask about the biggest struggle people encounter. Collect >10 answers and then create a course to solve that problem.
  • Google Keyword research (both for search traffic using something like Google's Keyword Planner and for search results to understand your competition)
  • The prototyping approach: create multiple landing pages, pay for ads to see if people sign up or not, email those people asking what they hope to get out of the course, then develop the course around their needs.

ELEMENTS TO INCLUDE TO SUPERCHARGE YOUR COURSE:

• "Learning is more effective if it is active..you need to think and reflect, create, assess, analyse, collaborate, and feel seen" - @utdiscant

The following items are modules, assets, and curriculum structures you can use to enable your students to go beyond passive video consumption:

• Project Based Learning (practice scenarios that students complete over the course of your program)
  • Go the extra step with personalized feedback for each student
• 1-on-1 Mentorship
  • Example: Design Lab offers 1-to-1 mentoring each week of their 4 week course on UX and UI design.
  • Recording these sessions to share as assets for other students to review is an easy way to create value for other students and get a higher ROI on this time
• Provide Downloadable Assets
  • Examples: detailed manuscripts for each video lesson, source code for coding projects, cheat sheets, glossaries, activity templates, etc
• Live Group Sessions
  • A mixture of live sessions and precorded video is recommended by multiple people. One strategy is to use the Live Group Sessions to review the homework, case studies, and hold small group discussions using break-out rooms (e.g. Zoom)
• Practice Questions and Exams
  • Provide a checkpoint for students to actively engage and ensure they are digesting the course content
• Peer to Peer Learning
  • Examples: study groups, discussion forums, video submissions from students shared within the cohort, and peer feedback with a tool like PeerGrade (created by @utdiscant)

THE TECH STACK FOR CREATING COURSES:

• You have three options to create and host your courses.
  • 1. Course Creation Platforms (best option for most people)
    • Teachable (specifically designed for online courses, starts at $39/month)
    • Podia (an online store front, works for eBooks, webinars, as well as courses, starts at $39/month)
    • Learnworlds (nice looking templates, starts at $29/month)
    • Kajabi (highly featured, but also highly expensive. I used it with a client a few years ago and was impressed, but it starts at $129/month)
    • Eduflow (by @utdiscant, starts at $0 for the first 50 students)
    • Gumroad (more of a general check-out provider than a course-creator, but many use it and enjoy how minimal it is)
    • Coursecraft (free plans available)
    • Google Classroom (free)
    • Thinkific (free plans available for up to 3 courses, with limited feature sets)
    • CourseMaker by @christopherGS (sign up for the beta for 50% off)
  • 2. Course Aggregators (best option for those with no interest in marketing)
    • Udemy (there is A LOT of contension around using Udemy. Per @yareki, you can expect $2-7/sale. The general consensus is that if you don't yet have an audience, Udemy can be a good place to start before moving to a Course Creation Platform or your own website)
    • Skillshare (seems like the preferable option to Udemy). Earnings are relative to your share of total watch-time on the platform. Effectively, using Skillshare is a bet that more people will use Skillshare, as their overall revenue increases so do your payments.
    • Skillwise (which I haven't seen much about)
    • Great post from @christopherGS with the breakdown on the payments and strengths of each of the above
  • 3. Personal Websites (best option for highly technical people and/or those selling other services alongside courses)
    • The most popular example of this is using Wordpress and a LMS plugin (LifterLMS was recommended by @jrn and @tangible)
    • Another excellent post from @christopherGS breaking down the options and their pros/cons
• Recording Screencasts/Videos
  • Screenflick (free for Mac only)
  • Loom (which I use and love, free for the first ~20 videos)
  • Camtasia (expensive but great for editing)
  • OBS (free!)
  • Zoom (free up to 40 minutes)
  • Screenflow ($129)
  • Handbrake to compress the video files (free!)
• Editing Software
  • Camtasia (mentioned)
  • Sony Vegas Pro
  • iMovie (free on Mac)
  • If you don't want to edit yourself, you can try Video Husky, Flocksy, or Internet Ideas made by @kyro
• Lights (Not Technically Tech but Super Important)
  • "Good lighting is what makes the diffrence between mediocre and good videos" - @aqui_c
  • Neewer has a great selection
• Recording Animated Explainer Videos
  • @mattes3 recommends Doodly
  • @tim12 recommends Videoscribe
  • @paoloamoroso recommends Explain Everything

PROMOTING YOUR COURSE (A.K.A HOW TO GET MORE STUDENTS):

• @YZhang suggests starting to pre-sell your course once you've built 10% of it. This will save you the pain of creating something beautiful that no one actually wants.
• Content Marketing: the easiest way is to write great content that attracts your ideal students and demonstrates your expertise
• Student Testimonials - ask students to post about their experience on social media, possibly in return for a coupon they can give to someone else.
• Share your expertise on communities like Twitter, Reddit, Quora, or even IndieHackers with links back to your course (avoid spamming though!)
• Guest Posting on Other Blogs (excellent resource with 100+ places to do so found by @neotrader84)
• CareerMove.io (by @launchbeast) includes courses and content from a variety of verticals.
• Coursefit.io (by @npturner) includes a bunch of courses from across various platforms.
• Discounts seem to be the bread and butter of many course makers. Use time-limited coupons (e.g. 20% in the next 14 days) to create a sense of urgency.
• Create free snippets of your course (e.g. templates, videos on Youtube, etc) to share widely in order to build interest in your course
• A great piece of advice from @andrewbrown that is echoed elsewhere: spend your time "25% on Product and 75% on Marketing".
• Building a community is the more surefire way to ensure you'll have high early sales. Fortunately there's an entire group here on IndieHackers for that (moderated by the Godfather @csallen )

HOW MUCH TO CHARGE:

• Think through your audience to understand what the market can bear (e.g. students can't pay much, professionals learning a new business skill can, etc)
• @zeke13210 recommends looking for the average price range for existing courses that teach something similar
• In the immortal words of @patio11 : "Charge More"
• A good range seems to be $19-$99+. Personally I'm starting ~$49, with discounts for pre-sales, with the aim of moving to $99 on my 2nd/3rd courses.

GOLD STAR EXAMPLES OF ONLINE COURSES:

• Forte Labs - Build a Second Brain
• David Perell's Write of Passage
• Ministry of Testing by @rosiesherry
• Y Combinator's Start Up School

MISC. RESOURCES:

• Course Creators Weekly Newsletter by @merott
• The Wes Boes and Adam Wathan podcasts with @csallen (recommended by @harrydry)
• Art of the Product podcast where two founders discuss selling Refactoring UI for $1m+
• Tips from Louis Nicholls on Twitter @louisswiss
• Tiago Forte on the Future of Online Education
• Curricular by @brianhsugreen has resources (both free and paid) to help course creators

NEXT STEPS:

If you want to see the notes come to life, check out my upcoming courses which will teach agencies and freelancers how to creatively solve problems using an entirely new set of tools.

I'll also be on Twitter live-tweeting as I continue to learn, always looking to connect with other IndieHackers!

P.S. - If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy the same type of summary I did for the Newsletter Crew group here on IndieHackers.