You’re ready to market the first run of your online cohort based course, but because the thing is still in beta, your details feel squishy. Which is making it hard to market (even if you’re a marketer).
This is especially true if you’re trying to teach from personal experience. You were goin’ through it, you tried something out, it worked, and then it kind of changed how you show up and maybe even your whole business. Now you want to teach it, but selling a beta test of an online course when the details aren’t concrete feels unethical.
There's a lot of folks that go through that kind of process. The obvious move seems like it's to hand your people the exact same thing that you did. Julia Meibos of Meibos Touch did that exact thing.
She helps creatives get visible online when the thought of doing it absolutely terrifies them. She was a guest on the Course Creation Crap podcast.
Listen to my full chat with Julia
OR listen to the BS Breakthrough in audio form on November 26th
If you are building a course out of the thing that worked for you, it’s squishy in beta, and you’re trying to figure out how to market a cohort based course while it’s still in beta, this one’s for you.
When the beta test of the course is based on YOUR experience, you have expert amnesia
Julia came to me because, despite being a marketer, she was struggling to market her course.
The program itself is called the Creative Garden, and she’s designed the course for creatives who want to be visible, but really want to throw up at the thought of actually doing it.
It’s divided into 4 seasons, and the first season is three weeks and focused on a daily video recording just for you. You're not sharing. And she describes it as kind of a mind dump to the camera. The idea is that the whole thing will kind of ease people toward being visible without having panic attacks.
In my call with Julia, she did already have four people that had signed up for this beta launch of her program. And so when you get folks in there, the last thing we want to do is kind of change the promise. They were all expecting a daily video.
What she was trying to teach is how she broke through on her own kind of visibility block, for lack of a better word, by recording a video to herself every day. For 100 days straight. And it worked for her. Something that she had been scared of doing for years. She started doing it. So for her, that meant to have her course open with those recordings, because that was the catalyst for her.
BUT the catch is that Julia didn’t go into creating daily videos cold. She’d been practicing using her voice with daily morning pages for three years; that’s three years of strengthening the “say your piece” muscle.
Why what worked for you can’t be carbon copied for the beta test of your course
When you design a course or program based on your own experience, you really need to consider where exactly you were when you started the process.
The reason why I pushed Julia to think outside of the thing that worked for her, and also the thing that she promised, is because it worked for the wrong person. So the version of Julia that it worked for had already done that work where she was writing every day.
That means even though four people signed up knowing that it's going to be a daily video, if they haven't warmed up that same muscle, they're really going to struggle with doing the daily video.
Giving them kind of an out without making them feel bad about it is going to be the critical part. Expanding it beyond video will get more folks interested in signing up in the first place. If they're already self-aware enough to realize, “oh no, I can't do that. I'm not ready yet,” then she can give them a way to get ready that’s not far off from what she had already done in the past.
This is a really common mistake that experts run into. It is so easy to forget all of the pieces and parts that built up to the thing that you felt was the catalyst. And while recording the daily videos every day for 100 days had a really big impact on Julia, the experiences before all that recording had a bigger impact than she gave them credit for.
So when you're designing courses for other people out of your own processes and your own experiences, you want to make sure that you see the bigger picture and give them those pieces.
The blind spot to check before you beta test an online course
All three breakthroughs below are, at the core, connected to one big blind spot. When you've been through it yourself, you tend to design for where you are now (or the thing you see as the catalyst for the change). But we never show up to new experiences without all that life living that came before it.
Breakthrough 1: You built the on-ramp for your own height
What I mean by “built the on-ramp for your own height” is that you’ve built the starting point at the place you THINK you started. When you’re teaching someone else a process, you have got to consider where, how, and why they’re stepping up to that line. So Julia did the daily videos as the first step of this course, because that is the one that she felt made it so she could express herself. Because it was the scariest for her.
But she forgot that that version of Julia that got so much out of that 100 days had been doing morning pages every single day for three years. And so that built up a tolerance for self-expression. If beginners come without any of that kind of tolerance build up, it's going to make those videos really hard. Harder than it was for her. And that's what you can't see from inside your own expertise.
The steps that feel automatic to you, that you don't even think about anymore, are the ones that your people are actually stuck on.
She said herself in our chat that three years ago Julia would not have been able to do the videos, and so she couldn't have been her customer at that point. That recognition is mission critical to teaching.
And it leaves space for more pathways to getting comfortable.
If you're building a course that's based on the things that you've done to get where you are, go look at that first step and then really think about who you were when you took that particular step. That's going to tell you a lot about whether or not the people that you're trying to sell to are ready for that bit.
Breakthrough 2: The path can be squishy if the destination is concrete
You want to make sure that you know the end goal. It's okay if you have a couple different ways that you're going to get them there and those ways are built from marshmallows instead of slate slabs.
The finish line stays where it is. For Julia that meant a daily video for the ones that are ready for it. If you're not ready for it, the end goal is still doing a daily video. It's just how we get there is a little bit different. It could be doing a written page, it could be audio.
It could be for the person that's done ten days of daily videos, and on day 11, it's just like, I can't today. Recording a voice note or writing as a way to still continue self expressing is still valid.
So these are all different ways to get in the house. We've got the front door, chimney, side windows, whatever. We're still getting in the house. So if you've built a course that works for you, remember that.
When I told Julia in that chat to widen the door, she pushed back a little bit. And that's not a bad reaction.
If somebody is doing something differently, how can you promise them the same results? Doesn't the whole thing kind of turn to a giant pile of mush?
And the answer to that is no, because the path and the destination are two different places.
The paths can be different because people come to you with different experiences that will determine which path they need to get to that destination.
Letting them make the choice about doing the video this week or switching to audio next week because the daily video wore you the hell out is critical to success. Skip it and come back. It's okay to wax and wane. That's actually how learning happens. It's not a straight line.
The thing that holds it all together, holds the people together, but also their experiences on the different paths, that is that concrete piece. And for Julia, the point at the end is eventually being able to hit publish without having a panic attack. The how we get there can be a bit meandering, especially in a beta. This is the time to determine what those paths are going to look like.
So if you are feeling like your course is a little squishy, so you're letting people kind of move in their own way, just make sure that that end destination is going to be the same, and let them move their own way.
Breakthrough 3: Measure the change yourself
This last breakthrough is measuring their change that they're going through on your own. Because as of right now, there's not a platform that will do it for you (but I’m working on that).
Julia's course is trying to shift something we can't see. We're not going to be able to see someone's confidence or lack of anxiety in the same ways we could see a change in skills, their ability to use a comma properly. We can see a skill change over time. We can't see squishy things change over time as easily (without asking).
And course platforms aren't set out to measure any of that. But they’re especially not set up to measure the things that we can't see. So that does mean having to measure it yourself. And it's boring, but it works.
So ask the same question at the start and then at every checkpoint. So Julia had planned to ask questions at the start and then at the end. But those questions were different and also not frequent enough. Especially in a beta test, you should be asking early and often for feedback.
The more often you can include the same question to start to measure how people are feeling, the better. So, for example, on a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable are you with being on video?
You have your scale from 1 to 10. If you ask that question again in three weeks and then three weeks after that, or however long the rest of the seasons are going to be, then you get to see the pattern.
How did they respond in that first survey? How do they respond in the next one? Are we seeing things go up? Are we seeing things go down? And it can help you see how people are feeling in that moment, because we cannot rely on their memories or ours. And this is just basic research design.
So for questions like that, you do want to make sure that you can connect the surveys together. So you don't want those to be anonymous. But throwing out some anonymous feedback opportunities will get you more honest feedback. Especially in a beta, because people that join our betas already like us. So they don't want to hurt our feelings.
And so having some short, concise surveys where you can do that measurement, but then also anonymous open ended questions, those can help us get that honest feedback and also have things that we can measure across time.
Your homework
This time ‘round you want to self-check where they are starting compared to where you started and dig into the change we’re trying to make.
Step one.
Take a look at the step that you're using as your starting point for your course and ask:
Who do they have to be?
What do they have to know?
What do they need to do to actually be ready for that?
And then compare it to where you were. That overlap or that disconnect will show you if there are other things that you need to build in in order to make it accessible for more people.
Step two.
Name the one thing that your course is really trying to change, especially if it's invisible. And write a question that measures it. And then plan out where exactly you're going to ask that same question. So you can start to see any changes.
Step three.
This seems disconnected to the rest of this, but is connected to the chat I had with Julia, if you want to go listen to that, is to take every task in your course and write one sentence that connects it to everything else, basically explaining why.
Why are you doing this?
Why are we trying to do xyz?
Why is this thing going to help?
If you’re still not sure if the marketing is the issue or the course is the issue, you can take my “Is it your marketing or your course?” quiz. If you want a more in depth discussion, grab a strategy session.