Preparing to walk 500 miles across Spain forced me to productize my onboarding; and accidentally build an LMS

Five years later — here's what's been happening

Hard to believe the last update here was 2021. Generator has been quietly growing since then and is now doing around $10k/mo; mostly through organic search and my HubSpot marketplace freemium funnel.

Tomorrow I will start walking the Camino de Santiago. 500 miles across Spain, roughly 35 days.

The business needs to run without me, and that forced me to take a hard look at the one part of Generator that was still tied to my time: customer onboarding.

Revenue is pretty passive at this point, but many new customers still needed me to walk them through the product setup...

So I turned the onboarding process into a course! Self-guided, structured, covers everything I'd normally walk a customer through live.

And since I'm a HubSpot developer, I just built it natively on HubSpot CMS rather than reaching for a third-party tool.

That decision kind of took on a life of its own 😆 what started as an onboarding doc upgrade turned into a the dev of full-on course builder powered by HubSpot, with lessons, progress tracking, and a pre-built sections library.

It's not a product yet. Right now it's just hosting the Generator onboarding course. But when I get back from the Camino, I'm gonna launch a website performance course to sell directly to Generator customers, and depending on how that goes, the course builder itself might become its own standalone HubSpot theme.

Next update will be from the other side of Spain.