How do I do an online course platform comparison?
Are you sure you’re ready for one? Before you waste the time and energy deep diving into course platforms, let’s make sure you’ve got the foundations ready.
In my last episode, we heard from Danielle Smith with Elemental Delta. She is a mindset and movement coach. While most of her work is one-on-one personal training, because she likes to help clients build sustainable health through identity shifts, not just more working out, the course that she had built was meant to support that.
But she has been deconstructing it in the membership because she never quite figured out how to integrate the course into the one-to-one work as a complement, even though the original vision was these four phases that covered mindset, nourishment, and movement.
Listen for the full episode
AND the BS Breakthrough (where I break down how this all applies to you)
TL/DR: You need to have the foundations BEFORE you pick your course platform.
How to simplify an overcomplicated course before you do an online course platform comparison
If you’ve got a course that has multiple goals it’s working towards, you’ll want to first check the size of those goals. That’s often the thing that leads to a course that’s become a damn certificate.
So Danielle came in asking: what is the cut-off? She’d already done the action oriented goals work, she’d already KNEW what she originally had was too big because she’d done that work in the membership. So she wanted to know where to draw the line of “this is the first course.” She also came in asking what platform to use. What I heard was Danielle was trying to build everything at once because she could see the whole vision.
It's an amazing vision, but vision and being able to execute it are two different things, and she didn't actually need all four pieces at the moment. She just needed the one piece that was going to, one, make all of those other pieces possible, and two, support the work that she's doing with one-on-one clients.
The real question at the core of these two was: what pieces need to exist right now. Because we answer those and then we can start to look at an online course platform comparison.
So we focused on the foundation piece that everything else really depended on. It’s what everything else builds on AND we really honed in on who it’s for. This is just one of the things that makes a good course.
This is something that she is trying to offer concurrently with her one-on-one training for clients who are ready to move beyond just doing workouts. Not everybody needs it. Not everybody's ready for it.
So you want to start small in that situation, and the context of being a complementary course matters. If this course was the whole business, maybe you would build out all four phases. If this course was a lead magnet, maybe it would be even smaller. But it wouldn't be for the specific clients that she is trying to help with this particular work.
When you start to ask: what does this piece of the puzzle need to do for the people who need it? The answers lead us to the course you need to build in that moment. The rest of it can wait.
Three things to help you get to doing an online platform comparison
You can’t pick a course platform if you don’t know what you need, and you can’t determine what you need unless you’ve figured out how to simplify an overcomplicated course.
The foundation needs to happen before you build the castle on it
You do not need to build the whole thing just because you can see how the whole thing works together. Danielle is the expert and she could see the whole learning arc. She knew exactly what each and every piece needed to cover.
She had the expertise to teach all four pieces, but it doesn't mean that's what she needed to build right now.
That urge to build everything at once is real, especially when you created this thing and you’ve been sitting on it OR you feel like in order to get people real value you need to give them everything.
Don’t build pieces just because you know that eventually your clients are going to need it. Because when you try to build the castle before you actually set those foundational pieces, you don't ever finish it. Or worse, everything gets built and it doesn't fit together properly.
The identity work is the foundation for Danielle’s people. And it's that shift in focus that makes everything else possible.
If you’re sitting on a course that feels too big, too sprawling, or like it's trying to do everything everywhere all at once, ask yourself, what's the foundation? What is the one piece that has to come first? That's what you're going to build so you know you’remaking the course the best it can be, and let the rest simmer.
Not everyone needs your course, and that's actually okay
There are a variety of jobs that a course can do for your business and determining who it’s for and why is critical to making decisions about goals and content and scope. So who is it for and what’s it doing for them?
This was a big reframe for Danielle because she had been thinking about this as something all of her clients might benefit from. But in reality, not everybody's really ready to do that work. Some clients, without judgment, want to come in for the physical training. They want to show up, do the workout, leave, and that's fine. And that's just not the course audience.
The course is for the clients who are ready to take next steps, who maybe have done the physical fitness thing multiple times, they've started and stopped, and they're realizing something else has to shift. These are the clients that are ready for these particular steps that she needs to take them to. And that's not everyone.
So when you try to make a course for everyone, you might end up watering it down for the people that actually need it. When you accept that a specific subset of your clients that need it, you can actually make a really amazing experience for them.
Danielle's homework was to create questions. Identify which one-on-one clients are actually a fit for this course so that she's not selling it to everyone. She's just identifying who really is ready, because that's going to help a lot.
If your course feels like it's not quite landing, ask yourself, am I trying to make this work for everyone, or am I being clear about who it's actually for?
The platform comes after you know what you're building
All platforms are garbageis my typical response to that platform question.
But, because I have been working with Danielle and she's gotten far just through the membership, we did talk about platforms. We talked through various types of platforms. We did land on what she wanted to create, but I still ended up coming back to what I always say, which is:
Don't pick a platform until you know exactly what you're building and who it's for.
And she's on the way to that who it's for, which is going to help with exactly what it's going to need.
Too many people start with a platform. They sign up with Teachable or Kajabi or Circle or whatever the heck's out there now. And then they try to build the course to fit the platform structure. That sh!t’s backwards.
You need to know: what activities are they doing? What kinds of reflection or practice make this thing work? How do you actually want them to receive the information? And then once you know that, you can pick the platform that supports it, not the other way around.
If you're stuck on platform decisions, stop. Back up. Ask yourself, how do I actually want learners to engage with the content? What am I actually getting them to do to get results?
That needs to be answered first. Platforms are second.
How to simplify an overcomplicated course so you can do an online course platform comparison
Step one: identify the pieces of your course.
If you're building something sprawling or multi-phased or with a bajillion modules, ask yourself, what is the piece that has to come first?
These are the things that make everything else easier, that make everything else possible. And that's the thing that you need to build first. It's okay to let everything else wait until you see what the people that come to you need next.
Step two: before you pick a platform, organize what you already have.
Put your activities into folders. Map out what students need to do. Pull the content in that supports the doing. Get clear on how you want them to engage. And then go platform shopping based on supporting what's in there.
If you need help with either one of those two steps, that is what we doin the membership; a membership designed to help you build, launch, and sell a course that actually works.
Podcast Music credit: Alex Mitchum
Alex, Catrina's youngest brother, was a jazz guitarist. This was one of the last stems he recorded before he died, and his family established a scholarship in his name at his alma mater. Please consider donating: https://www.alexmitchum.com/scholarship