9
18 Comments

What's the best platform for creating online courses?

Hello everyone, I was wondering what do you use for creating online courses?

Something like podia.com, teachable or something else?

Also, do you think building an audience first is important or creating the course and build an audience at the same time is still fine?

  1. 2

    Most online course platforms are good enough for most use cases. I don't think there's a best platform, although depending on the type of content you want to create, one might be better than another.

    Building an audience is an import part of creating an online course. It's the best way to find out what people really want/need. Also, when you have an audience already, selling becomes much easier.

    You can start building an audience by sharing your knowledge on the platforms where your audience hangs out. Could be Twitter, Reddit, or even IH, depending on what you're teaching.

    @YZhang suggests starting to pre-sell your course once you've built 10% of it.

  2. 2

    I think building an audience while you're creating a course goes pretty well hand in hand. While you create the content for the course, you have so many thoughts, so many ideas that won't make it in that form into the course. Share them!

    In terms of selling the finished course, it's always nice to already have a warm and interested audience. If you don't have extensive marketing knowledge and a good budget to run ad campaigns, you need the audience on launch day.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the reply. I think I’ll create something small just to get my feet wet. Experiment a little bit with ads and see how it goes.

      I made the classic mistake to code first and then try to find customers with my saas. Now I don’t have any customers and I have a project that I believe might be useful for people trying to learn how to code and ship a product. So I am thinking to get the code from that project. Chunk it in small pieces and make it as courses.

      One of my worries is that I am not native english speaker. We’ll see how it goes

      1. 2

        Your failed SaaS product is not a result of coding first because that's not possible in a solo project since you only fail if you give up. Also, who says you have to tell people you've already built something? Which means you can act as if you haven't built anything yet, if you really think that's going to be an easier path to finding customers, right? Coding first is not your problem.

        I think you should take a step back and reexamine the situation and your options before you decide on your next step.

        Starting a course just because you have some code laying around from a failed project doesn't exactly sound like a recipe for success. And if the code isn't from a successful project, where's the appeal in that for the potential students? Is this going to be worth putting time and money into? Being a really good instructor that gets top reviews from students is not easy. Your technical chops has little to do with it.

        Since you have a finished SaaS product, don't you want to get to the root of the problem and figure out why you can't sell it? Does it solve a problem for someone? If not, what do you need to change in order for it to solve a problem people will pay for? Have you tested all your original assumptions? You must have had some ideas before you invested the time to build it out.

        You're in the ideal situation because you can still go around and conduct customer development interviews, etc. because you obviously can simply act as if you didn't code it yet. But I think you already know the lean startup methodology isn't as easy as it sounds.

        Don't throw in the towel yet!

      2. 1

        Then you'll need to work with a native English speaking editor to clean it up or it won't be appealing to a native English speaking customer.

        Also, I'd suggest dropping questions into forums where your target customer visits asking "Would you be interested in testing out a course I developed on xxx at no charge?" getting a few people to try it out, provide their feedback and more importantly, some testimonials you can use to market the course on your website/landing page.

  3. 2

    A little known but unique platform worth mentionings is Leanpub.

    While the major course platforms are heavily based on video, Leanpub stands out in that it lets you create courses that focus on text content such as textbooks or lecture notes. There are learners who, like me, heavily prefer text. I wouldn't consider a video course, not even if cheap or free.

    1. 1

      I have never considered Leanpub as a course delivery platform. Also, I found it pretty useless even for selling books :(

  4. 1

    You can check this :- hyperlink academy

  5. 1

    There are subtle differences across the platforms. Teachable is more fully featured, highly targeted to online courses, and helps you with some aspects of compliance. Podia is more of an online store front, so you can use it for other things like ebooks and webinars. I'm looking for beta testers for CourseMaker which is targeted more at a technical course creator and is more affordable.

    Another option if you do not have any audience or experience with marketing is to choose a marketplace, although you must select your niche very carefully. You also need to meet a quality bar so you don't get into a negative review downward spiral. Here's an evaluation of the pros and cons

    If you would like advice (I have online courses with 10k plus students) feel free to email me (see my bio)

    1. 1

      How is your platform different from other players?

      1. 1

        Targeted at technical course authors, allowing them to use tools they like (markdown, git) instead of just WYSIWYG (although they can use that too if they prefer). Plus more affordable pricing. Plus parts to be open-sourced (coming soon)

        1. 1

          Thanks for your response! Do you already have any courses hosted? I'm interested to look =)

  6. 1

    I’ve heard very good things about Gumroad. But seems like you want a bit of an audience first

  7. 1

    Besides the big ones, there is also a new platform I will have a listing on shortly - https://www.uqualio.com/

  8. 1

    Hi, I use Kajabi for my course at TheSaaSAcademy.com. And regarding audience, yes, that is really helpful. I built an audience of 25K+ subscribers over 4 years at TheSaaSCFO.com prior to launching a course.

    1. 1

      Genuine question, not trolling: what made you go for Kajabi? It is significantly more expensive than Teachable, Podia, Thinkific and LearnWorlds and doesn't seem to offer any additional features. What swung it for you?

      1. 2

        Hi Christopher, yes, valid question. I met the team there and they are great. So I was trying to build my course on WP and plugins. I gave up. I just didn't want the headache of maintaining that and having plugin conflicts, hosting going down etc. I thought that was worth the trade of $100 or so a month. Big peace of mind and better functionality. Now, if I was selling a lower price point course and low volume, I might have gone a less expensive route. But I had an email list of 30k through my blog at TheSaaSCFO.com so I felt that I'd be able to cover the cost. Hoe that helps.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments