The Value of Pre-Launching/Testing Online Courses
Hi, fellow Indie Hackers 🙌
Quickly wanted to share my journey.
- Earlier this year I decided to go all-in on becoming an online course creator
- My area of expertise is company building - specifically: remote-first companies (I built a remote-first co from idea to exit)
- Now I'm creating an email-based course (EBC) about documentation for remote teams (target audience: managers of remote teams who want to level up) // launch price: $199
- I finished writing chapter 1 (out of 3) and pre-launched my course w/ payments enabled // pre-sale at $99
Learnings so far:
- Paid validation is killer
- Instead of just pre-selling it, I asked my 2 paying customers ($99 each) if I can already have them go through the first chapter of the course (even though the rest of the content is not ready to go live) - both agreed
- Major benefit: They are giving me feedback during their learning experience >>> this gives me customer insights to tailor/improve chapters 2-3 to my target audience
My Stack:
- MailerLite for email delivery/automation
- Stripe Payment Links (w/ Stripe Tax enabled) for payment processing
- Notion for content hosting of "transition pages" (i.e. unique URLs to trigger self-pacing automation in ESP/MailerLite)
- Zapier as glue
Happy to hear if anyone had similar experiences?
Let me know if you have any questions.
Hi Art,
I totally agree with you. Testing course ideas before deep dive into big time investments is a necessity for a robust growth. We are also interested in this issue and built an online tool to enable training professionals to start small and lean -> https://minicoursegenerator.com
Email-based course creation or YouTube playlists are valid and common practices for testing ideas quickly. They work well. From our point of view, the only missing part is they lack of interactivity. Both email-based and video-based training samples are offering one-way communication, they can not provide insights about the audience since they do not offer a good experience to include questions and collect feedback from your leads. I think that being not able to collect qualitative feedback during test period means missing an opportunity about learning your audience to optimize your marketing.
What do you think about that?
Cool product & cool idea.
If someone wants to check out the pre-sales page: https://remotefabric.com/