Marketing a summer bioinformatics course. Any advice?
Hey everyone!
Each of the 4 summers I was in grad school, I helped teach graduate students who were primarily experiment focused how to program and analyze their data. Over those four years, I built both a curriculum and an interactive platform that allows students to submit scripts online and have them automatically checked to see if they satisfy the problem.
I was originally thinking I’d leave this project behind when I graduated, but given the unique circumstances of this year, I’m planning on offering a paid version of the course this summer. In addition to having mini-projects from the platform, I’m going to teach classes via Zoom and having 1:1 “office hours” with students.
The problem is, while I’m extremely comfortable with programming and bioinformatics, I have minimal marketing or sales experience. At this point, I’ve pulled together a landing page, but I’m not really sure how to get it in front of the people who would benefit from seeing it, especially given the nicheness of the course.
Does anyone have any suggestions about how to go about marketing and selling a course?
Thanks!
Get in contact with the people you previously helped and ask them for feedback.
And how did you find those previous students? Find some more like you did with them.
Getting in contact with previous students is a great idea. I’ll follow up on that!
Previous students were from UNC, and signed up for the course through the graduate school. That class is still going on, taught by another instructor using CodeStories. But they’ll be taking their course for free. :)
What @rosiesherry said +
Maybe your angle should be different - High priced coaching sessions + you get amazing software for free?
Start there and build an audience + learn what they really need from the software while getting paid.
Also, after 10-100 sessions, you'll have an intimate understanding of your audience and a large database of users you can/should interview for marketing purposes.
That’s definitely how I’m thinking about the pricing structure (paying for the experts time, getting the software for free). But I guess I don’t state that explicitly anywhere on the site.
And I’ve actually done about 10 interviews already! All of those were with graduate students. Hopefully I’ll be able to do the same with paid students after this!
Very cool!
You're on the right track :)