How To Launch Your First Course As Quickly As Possible

In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen discusses the challenges of rapidly establishing an online course and the typical errors that hinder developers. He clarifies that the most significant obstacles are frequently psychological rather than technical, including the expert’s curse, impostor syndrome, and overanalyzing before beginning.

Kurt stresses how crucial it is to have a well-defined plan before using the platform. Frustration and stalled launches result from the fact that many course developers purchase tools and start creating without first defining their content, structure, or delivery method. Kurt highlights the importance of attention and time dedication. He cautions against attempting to construct courses in brief, dispersed time blocks, stating that frequent disruptions impede progress and make the job appear more difficult than it actually is.

Rather, he urges authors to set aside concentrated, uninterrupted time to complete the course’s primary components. Additionally, he minimizes the importance of great manufacturing quality. Kurt emphasizes that solid concepts, well-defined frameworks, and practical approaches are far more important than flawless production by using a real-world example of a sizable, well-funded training firm providing great information with subpar images and sets.

In general, Kurt supports:

• Putting execution ahead of perfection
• First, developing a bare minimum of a workable course
• Maintaining concentration on resolving a particular issue
• Allowing content quality to take precedence over technical or aesthetic excellence

His message is straightforward: action, clarity, and focus rather than over-optimization are the keys to speed, and done is preferable to flawless.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, Kurt von Onan. He’s back on the show. Kurt is from Mana No Mas. You can find that@manananomas.com. Kurt also works with LifterLMS directly. You’ve seen him on some of our live calls and office hours, masterminds. Today we’re gonna get into how to launch an online course quickly and get really specific, tell some stories around that.

Talk about some of the things that happen if you move too slow. I’d just like to say when it comes to online education, particularly in the entrepreneurial context, that speed is your friend. But before we dive into it, Kurt, welcome back on the show. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Thanks, Chris. It’s great to see you again, man. I love our chats.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s good to see you too. We’ve been around this industry for a long time. Over a decade you’ve launched courses, you’ve helped many clients launch e-learning websites. What would you say, let’s say if an entrepreneur wants to launch quickly. Their course, but it just, it’s not working or it doesn’t launch, and it’s just where the speed is not happening.

What mistakes are they likely making or could be making that are causing challenges with the speed to market?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Without trying to be somebody’s psychotherapist, Chris, there, there is a strong, like you call it, the experts curse. And then there’s the imposter syndrome. There’s, all these things that people can mentally sabotage themselves with just to even get to a point where they can launch.

And it’s really important to overcome those things. But the thing functionally that I see with people is just not. Really having a, strategy or should I say a, like a real plan like, a real what is my content gonna look like? What’s gonna be included? How am I gonna build this out? Like they have an idea, they have an overall concept of, Hey, it’d be cool if I made a course about, but then they, buy a platform, they start to work in it and they start to get frustrated because they haven’t actually sat and created any kind of pre-planning to get into the project.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, there’s a lot there. It’s one of the reasons why I like to recommend people start with a free course. ’cause it takes a lot of pressure off. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: It also helps you build an email list. It’s easier to get free enrollments than paid enrollments. And just to tell a quick story, we’ve always done the lifter LMS Quickstart course, which is essentially 45 minutes of content that teaches you the 5% most important parts of lifter.

So that you can launch an online course website quickly, but remember I said 5%. We’re not teaching a hundred percent. We have thousands of videos on our YouTube channel, other courses a thousand pages of documentation. It can be used in all kinds of different ways, but I realize that to launch the quick start course quickly, I can’t cover everything and I also don’t want to overwhelm people.

And the very first time I made that course. We did a pre-sale where at the very beginning of LifterLMS, where we sold LifterLMS at a discount before we even built it or finished building it, we had a specific date that it was going live. So we had a deadline and then we’re scrambling to the last minute to get the software ready and then the afternoon before the launch.

I sat down for four hours and recorded the first version of the Quickstar course. And where I was at the time, I did not even have strong enough internet to upload those videos to. I was using Vimeo, so I actually got my car. There was a developer named Mark Nelson who worked for us. I drove 45 minutes down the road in Montana, which was the halfway point between where myself and Mark lived.

I handed him a hard drive and asked him, he had high speed internet, and I asked him to upload those videos to our Vimeo. And then once I got back to my house, couple an hour later, he had got all the videos uploaded. I used the first version of Lifter to launch that course. So literally we launched the first course in about six hours and every single person that bought Lifter signed up for that course.

And then a lot of people who were interested and curious signed up for that course. And it became the main engine of our growing our email list. And I’ll say something that’s really important here. That was almost 13 years ago. We have redone that course at least five times. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So the first course was not the perfect thing, but we just got it done.

Kurt Von Ahnen: No, done is better than perfect. And there’s a key element in your story, Chris, and I think it’s really important when you had the deadline. That, that, okay. All that’s great. But when you started to do it, you sat and you did it. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: like I’ve run into a lot of want to, I want to be, that’s a bad way to say it, of potential course creators.

I run into a lot of potential course creators that, that they want to do it. 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, half hour there, 45 minutes there, and. I have that huge background in automotive and fixed operations and technicians, right? So I know firsthand, especially through data, that every time you interrupt yourself from a task you, don’t just have the delay of the interruption, but you have the lost productivity to restart the process.

And so a lot of people that can’t. Commit the required time to get some major element done. They try and piecemeal it out a set a little piece here and here They end up frustrating themselves because it seems like it’s harder than it is. It seems like they have to keep redoing or rehashing or going into something and they’re just not seeing it get done.

But it’s because they haven’t given themselves the time and the space to actually execute. 

Chris Badgett: That’s important, what you’re saying. I call it deep work like course creation. When you’re in the content production aspect of it, it’s deep work. So if you’re gonna drop into the zone, almost any course I create, not all of them, but I create the whole thing in a day at or two.

But I have to give myself that container of time and space to get in the flow. Stay in the flow, don’t stop till I finish. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And at this point in my life, I I was staying up later than I should have, but I just got the thing done. I just said, I’m not stopping until this is done.

And the other thing that’s important is I did not introduce a bunch of technical friction to my workflow. All I did was open up Zoom and do a screen share, and press the record button using my camera that was built into my laptop and a microphone that was built into my laptop. That was version one, and that was it.

I didn’t start I’m fancy now. I got like green screens and all kinds of stuff, but I didn’t start there and I could have done that. I could have gotten really obsessed with video production and. Editing. I don’t think none of those videos were even edited. It was just, I just went, and I’m not saying you should be that raw and that cut and 

go, maybe cut and go running and gunning, but it’s definitely viable, particularly if.

If you’re doing a paid course and you don’t even know if anybody will buy it there’s all that goes into it as well. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I had, and my wife could back me up on this one because I, basically had a short circuit a month ago, Chris. I’m, John Maxwell certified. I paid the money. I went to Orlando.

I did the thing with 3000 other people to for speaking leadership and training, right? So I got this certification and it’s five grand to get this thing. Thousands of people do it. And I just wanna put people at rest here because I swear there’s a message to this story. I, got tired of their content and stopped watching years ago, but they had announced and it came to my email and they were really pushing at the, new year to come to this webinar.

Chris, I signed into the webinar and it had an atrocious background like a green screened in. Background of like their corporate logo two subject matter experts sitting at a counter with each other having a conversation. And when they went to do like visual aids or when they went to break into a really cool breakout idea.

One of the subject matter experts literally, turned around with their back to the camera and started writing on a paper post-it flip chart thing on an easel. Yeah. And so I just wanna bring people back to the reality that if your content and your ideas and your methodologies are sound, your delivery mechanism is less important.

We’re talking about a multimillion if not billion dollar training organization that started in like 2011. And they’re still they’re still trolling the internet with bad backgrounds and paper flip charts. It’s, don’t worry about production value so much. Get your idea down. Get that minimal viable product done, and then see what traction you can gain with it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I like that. And I won’t go into it super deeply ’cause we just did a podcast a couple ago about pain. But if you really know what pain you’re solving and it’s acute pain, particularly if it’s time bound, people don’t care. If you get let’s say you get diagnosed with something at a doctor or you, don’t, you’re gonna go look for information.

You’re not caring about production quality. You just want quality subject matter expertise and help with your issue. Like it just doesn’t matter. So if you have like your subject matter expertise, it’s not like you have, I always call it the Library of Alexandria. You don’t have to put the whole library in the course.

Just help the person solve the pain with the minimal amount of information as possible to get them from A to B. And that’s what it’s all about, doing a thousand lesson course or a membership full of 50 courses as what you’re launching with is just too much. You’re not it’s, unfocused, but maybe that’s your goal.

Maybe you do want to have a library. I’ve seen it like you accompanied me and Dan Martel’s SaaS Academy. There’s a lot of stuff in there, but you know what Dan did really was. Every kind of micro course or coaching session was very pain specific, and he did his best to help you through it through a teaching framework that was very consistent from one training to another.

So you learned how to learn from Dan, and it was very well done, but I know when he started it, it was just. He had a couple courses and 20 entrepreneurs, 20 entrepreneurs in a room now he fills out auditoriums and stuff. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. He’s a really interesting guy. His, book on buy Back Your Time is a real game changer for folks that are looking for something to read.

It’s a good book. 

Chris Badgett: It is good. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So when we’re saying how to launch a first course as quickly as possible, we kinda have to get ourselves back into that mindset of like first course. What was it like when we first got started? And so we mentioned we say minimalism, right? So we want to keep things simple.

But to you, Chris, give me an example of, minimalism, because I could literally just do, I could literally just do WordPress, the free core lifter plugin, and launch a course as a sample product. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah you could totally do that. And, just, I want to give an example from my history, like I have a, I had a project for a long time.

It’s no longer aro around. It was called Organic Life Guru. So I chose the Permaculture Niche, which is a subset of organic agriculture. My wife has a degree in conservation based agriculture, so our first course for this platform, and I had big plans working with subject matter experts, which I did. It started with my wife made a course in a day about how to do raised bed gardening in a organic way for the first timer, and she did it all in a day.

And now that I had that one course, then when I went to a famous author in the space who had tons of books, but no course content. I could show them a real kind of course marketplace that I owned and built, and here’s a sample of what my wife Sam did, and it was real. And then this other expert came onto our platform.

And for him, like as an example, there was a guy named Toby Hemingway. He had the number one bestselling course in the world on permaculture, or sorry, book called on Permaculture. I saw that Toby, I was living in Montana at the time that Toby was going to be doing a talk in Washington State, which wasn’t far away in a, couple weeks.

So we sent him an email and we’re like, Hey, we have this thing we’ll do this revenue share with you. You don’t even have to change anything. I just want permission to come and film your presentation that he had a packed auditorium full of people at. He was like, sure. And then literally we, that’s a situation where we’re working with an outside subject matter expert, but we recorded his talk in a day.

We chunked it through video editing into the lessons, launched it sent out an email to our little list and did some social media marketing on permaculture forum and stuff. And I woke up the next morning and there was our first sale. From a somebody in New Zealand who I did not know. Yeah. And that, that all happened really quickly.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then once that worked I, partnered with other experts in different permaculture sub niches and things like that, and we just rinse and repeated that strategy. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So what I like about that story is. It’s not all up to you. You’re not an island all by yourself. It’s totally cool to partner with other people or share assets or come up with partnerships and arrangements.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and just we talk about a lot on this podcast, the five hats, the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the community builder, and the technologist. If you’re not strong on the website. I see tons of people get bogged down on the website aspect, the technology, the making, the e-commerce work and all this stuff.

You can work with an agency like Kurt’s. If you are like the subject matter expert and you’re not a WordPress professional or a you’re not like an e-commerce expert or you’re not a marketing expert, you can work with people to remove those bottlenecks and really speed up. So just know your strength, know where you’re strong, and know where your weaknesses are.

So with my organic gardening thing I was the WordPress expert. My wife was the subject matter expert, and I wore the entrepreneur hat and figured out the business of how we’re gonna do this and the contract with the the royalty share and the, all that stuff. Then we started going to stronger or more popular experts.

We’re not doing it alone. And I think the most common mistake is really between the subject matter expert and the technologist. If you really strong subject matter expert and you know nothing about websites, but you really know you want this thing, you can DIY it and learn it. That’s why the lifter LMS Quickstart course works.

Yeah. But if you wanna move faster or have more budget and you want to invest in like your whole website and all these other things you want to do, just work with an agency that can help you just not have to wear that hat yourself. You don’t have to do it all yourself. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I think that’s huge.

And then as far as tools go, I really don’t think the tool list is all that extensive. If I’m looking at a a simple first course to launch. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: What, do you think people really need to bring to the table? For me I’m, a basics person. I’m a just back to basics guy. I’m like in with both feet, man let’s, do this thing.

And maybe I have some social media, Facebook posts, a Facebook group. I’ve got a group of people somewhere. I’ve got a tribe that I’ve been talking to about this topic for some amount of time. And now I just want to get some people in there to see what I’ve built so far and get some feedback.

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Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It’s validation. It’s just moved fast. I know how to drive WordPress, but so what I would do if I was doing a new course is I would do the, I would get the Lift LS Earth bundle plan, which is gonna give me the e-commerce and selling ability as a website person, I already have web hosting.

I know how to buy a domain name. I know I would just use the Lifter Tech. That’s the least of my concern, just, but I’m a strong technologist and I would focus more on the sales page for the course. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So I love this idea from Jeff Bezos at Amazon, I believe this was from where before they would launch a new product, they would write, the very first thing before anybody did anything is they would pretend that it was already launched and they would write the press release.

First, and what that forces you to do is it forces you to say here’s this thing. This is what it does. This is why it’s awesome. This is who it’s for. This is what makes it unique. And you do that first, and then that becomes your north star of what you’re driving towards. And a simple way to think about that in websites is build the sales page first and even before you’ve launched it. We’re gonna do another episode on validation, but even if you’re just playing with the idea, if you’re not ready to launch it, at least put a coming soon email list, capture up and see and start promoting it before it’s done. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And there’s nothing more motivating that will speed you up on a launch than just knowing people have the hands up and they’re interested.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re a really huge proponent of that whole concept of product market fit, right? Get people to pull it from you. And so the only way that happens is to let people know what you’re thinking about doing and or, that you’re an expert in the space and then you know that product market fit gets to be a more, more viable thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m also a huge fan of live delivery of the first version. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. So yeah, I am. 

Chris Badgett: I did that. I did that and that when you have a live audience, even if it’s small, it gives you the opportunity to not create the content in advance of selling it. And you just record that live delivery and you do it like one week at a time or one day at a time, whatever your cadence is.

It just forces you to pre-sell it and then forces you to stay on schedule, delivering it to the best you can with the time constraints you have. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I would say another thing that I, again, from my agency perspective, what I see, especially new course creators stumble on is. It’s odd because let’s say that they went to another, let’s say they went to some kind of SaaS platform.

If they were in a SaaS platform, they wouldn’t have a lot of design choices. They wouldn’t have a lot of opportunity to customize each and every page and font and, shading and all that. But for some reason, when they’re in the WordPress space and they understand that it’s possible to customize everything, I think that opens up, for me, it’s an obstacle, right? I know that some people say it’s an op, it’s an opportunity. But it’s an obstacle because it, prevents a fresh creator from delivering ’cause they think their content’s too simple looking if they don’t overdesign or over style either the learning content or the the framework around the learning content.

And so I think it’s fairly important to mention that stuff. If that can come later get your con, get your, use the course builder, get your sections in, get your lessons in get, that stuff published and get some people. Taking the actual content. And then if you get feedback that says, oh, it would be better if the background was baby Blue.

I guess you could consider that. But the idea that before you release it, you’re thinking this page should be baby blue and this page should be periwinkle and this page should be sky blue and this page should be cyan. I think people get lost in the weeds on that. And it prevents them from launching.

Whereas if you just and I’m probably dominating this part of the conversation, I apologize, but I’ve had so many clients tell me I need a highly designed, highly styled website. I need and they, it needs more sizzle, it needs more pop. And the, and you’re like, define that? What, are you even talking about?

And then they’ll say like Apple. And then you go to the Apple website and it’s a white page with black letters on it, and you’re like what do you want me to do with your website again? It’s, 

Chris Badgett: I’m a big fan of the comment the best marketing is a good product. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: In my opinion, like I think in WordPress or whatever, or lifter.

So I’m very comfortable building a course, like in the course builder from scratch. But even still, like before I even open up something that’s gonna give me a bunch of design options, I, and even still this goes for when I write emails as well, like a marketing email. I intentionally write it on a text editor pad with zero formatting, no bold, no italics, nothing.

Just get the words out courses and education at its foundational level is words like the design and making the website fancy. That is all just like icing on the top. We talked in our last episode about the black box. Part of the subject matter Expert Curse is you’ve got it in your head, but to get it outta your head, you need to start writing words on paper or on a text document or Google document or in the course builder.

And your first version, like a lot of writing is editing. Just start. For me personally, I like to go, I start with the creative write brain and I do mind maps and I, just put bubbles on a paper. And then from there, once I do my brain dump, then I’m ready to start going to a text document and start.

Kind of thinking and chunking and sections and lessons and things. And from there, once I’m pretty happy with it, I move it into the course builder. And then from there, now I can work on one thing at a time. So you mentioned getting into deep work before. So now when I have my outline, now I have to do that again where, okay, we had this individual lesson, now I need to list out what I want to cover here.

Then like we mentioned with Dan Martel as an example, his trainings all have a similar flow of like big ideas, key principles, worksheet. So he has like a teaching framework that he uses. So if you have a teaching framework that puts even more guardrails or bumper lanes on your focus and energy and all that can serve you very well from just getting the.

The idea, I wanna have a course about X, like into actually having and launching a course about X. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s really good stuff. I was trying to think if there was anything else that would make me say, how do I launch the course more quickly? And it’s gonna seem a little self-serving, Chris, but you mentioned deadlines and the other thing that comes to my mind is accountability.

And so sometimes. Maybe you’re a person that has the best of intentions. I had a client that helped people publish their first book, right? And so you have a subject matter expert. They’re gonna write a book and they actually hired my client. I built the website for the client, but they, I would hire my client to basically do live meetings, masterminds, chapter reviews, and try to keep people inspired to keep ’em on a timeline to actually publish the dang book.

Because writing a book is similar to, making a course, I think there’s a lot of value in. New people, whether you call it a coach or you call it an agency or you call it a mentor like for lifter LMS. If someone’s in the universe or infinity bundle, they can come to the office hours, call.

What a great place for accountability. They could do a screen share, they could show the rest of the members what they’ve done so far. People could kick in with ideas and then they can come back a week or two later and show updates and then have some kind of inspiration to move forward. But if you’re a reclusive kind of person and you’ve locked yourself in your one bedroom apartment with a laptop and you’re trying to change the world with this new course of yours, but you’re just not making headway, sometimes you need to.

To bring some accountability into the picture to keep you focused and keep you moving. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m a big fan of that. We recently did an episode several back where I just mentioned that I had done a hundred mile run and I did not think that I needed accountability. But through all that process, that was like a two years of training.

I hired a running coach and. I ran today. I still have the same running coach. I opened my phone and there’s what I have to do. Like I, before we got on the call together, I ran four miles with a certain type of speed thing that I did. But just knowing that his name’s Kevin is on the other end, he’s given me my marching orders for the day.

I didn’t think I needed that. I’m a highly motivated, fast action taker, capable of long efforts, but there’s no way I could have run. I figured out how to run a hundred miles and stuck to it. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Without having that accountability. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’ve done some long distance bicycling, Chris, but a hundred mile run is the same as a 400 mile bicycle ride.

I don’t know if you knew that. 

Chris Badgett: I didn’t know that. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, so I haven’t done a 400 mile bicycle ride yet. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. A hundred mile bicycle is a century they call it. A century ride. Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s like the equivalent of a, marathon for you. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. But that was a big goal. And even before that, like I did a 50, like on that journey, I did a 50 mile run.

And in the very beginning of all that I’ve always been somewhat athletic and getting outside and stuff like that. But my first run. Was like I was getting back in shape. I had gotten outta the habit. I was having some chronic back pain issues, but I just had to start and take imperfect action, follow the plan, and it worked.

Is that whole thing about you, what you underestimate what you can accomplish in a year, but overestimate what you can accomplish in a day is totally true. So if you stick to it, I remember when a fast six mile run was like really hard for me. Now that’s, now like a warmup and it’s but that just took, so my point here to tie it back to launching courses quickly, you mentioned a lot of things early, but one of the things besides imposter syndrome and shiny object syndrome with tools and stuff, I think one of the worst.

Things that affects all of us, myself included, and I’m sure you too, is perfectionism. It’s your relationship with perfectionism. So like it is really easy to get sidetracked, particularly when a website comes into play of having the perfect website. I know a lot of people with websites, and I don’t think any of them are 100% satisfied with their website and from a, it’s absolutely perfect.

And even if it was for a MI for a day, a minute a month some new tech rolls out, some new design trend rolls out and it’s no longer perfect again. So we have to check our relationship with perfectionism. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. And even if you had the perfect website, the audience would change over time, which means it’s not the perfect website.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it never happens. It’s like, a aspirational goal, like having the perfect course, having the perfect online business, having the perfect e-learning product. It’s, aspirational, but it’s not a prison. It’s good to want quality, but it’s better. I always say the people that are most successful with lifter LMS.

Have take forward imperfect, consistent action that every single case study I’ve ever done from an interview standpoint. I always find that element no questions asked. Yeah, I launched, but I wasn’t really happy with it or. I messed up this part of the marketing or my sales page is not what I want.

Things like that, but that they took action. And then once you get that signal of product market fit it starts taking off like I know you did in some of your work. There’s a concept of startups called pivots. Sometimes you have to pivot a little bit or like course correct on the fly. So you did something where you were doing tell us the story, but it was it was a training for certain types of organization and you found like another person that could help sell it and then you would deliver it.

Yeah. And that’s that’s a pivot. You’re just moving you’re moving, and then you find like resource and then you pivoted. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: That project is a great case study for people that are getting into learning because it has multiple pivots and you can’t, and you just can’t give up. So I have.

Very clear memories of experiences where I tried something and it didn’t work and I got frustrated and I turned it off. Whatever the, it was I quit. And then a year or two years later, someone else comes along, does the exact same thing that I was doing and becomes a millionaire.

And that happened to me three separate times. And so when I launched the Powersport Academy, I knew. I knew that I was the subject matter expert on the subject, and I knew I had the best product in the country. So when I went to release it, I I was shocked that nobody bought it. And I think I was talking to you at the time, Chris, you helped me with some copy on the homepage.

I remember that you’re like, you’re not even talking another pain point like you’re talking about how great your course is, but who cares? What pain point are you fixing for them? So you helped me with that a little bit. But then after about a year of failing, I recognize that I was selling to the wrong people.

I was trying to sell the course to the people that I would be actively training rather than trying to sell the course to their employers. Who would be investing in the training for their staff to take. And that seems like a basic mistake, but I made the mistake for a year before I really caught on. So even after I had the right target audience to sell to, it still wasn’t really meeting the.

It wasn’t meeting the potential that I had for it. And so I was getting a little disgusted and I thought maybe I’ll just turn the thing off. But I didn’t wanna do that ’cause of my experience before quitting and then finding out that I missed an opportunity. So out of the blue. Someone that I had talked to three years prior hit me up and said, Hey, do you still train motorcycle dealerships how to do more service sales?

I said, yeah, we do. And he said, Hey, I have an organization where my organization trains groups of dealers in 20 groups, so there’s 20 dealers in each group. He says we’ve got four groups now we’re gonna have five real, real shortly, and they all wanna have service training. Is that something that we could contract through you?

Then that just became a partnership made in heaven. Chris, I, so now I do a revenue share with them. I do the training with the dealers. They use my content, and the partner is in charge of sales distribution, follow up, invoicing social media shares. They have staff that does. All of the heavy lifting that I didn’t want to be bothered with or that I was frustrated with.

Over a five year course of time, they’re handling that for me and our sales are up. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s land the plane just like a quick AI segment.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I knew it was coming. 

Chris Badgett: One of the things AI can help you do is speed up. I definitely don’t recommend that you just try to delegate the entire project to ai, but I’m just gonna give some examples of how to launch an online course more quickly using ai.

When you do write your syllabus or your curriculum, your lessons. Do it first as a human with your unique knowledge, but then ask the ChatGPT or whatever tool you use to like, Hey, is there any gaps? Anything else that would be helpful to really complete this? I’m trying to take this type of person from this A to this B.

That’s an example when it comes to the website. Oh, I need an about page on my website, and you see yourself as not a great writer. Okay, just. Tell, give AI a bunch of facts. You can even, it can even be full of typos. Give it the context I need an about page for my website. It’s an LMS, and it’ll give you a first draft of about page content.

Websites need a privacy policy terms and conditions page. I’m not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice, but if you just need a first draft of a, you’re not used to writing privacy policy pages, who is. Just ask the AI to give you a first draft. 

How To Launch Your First Course As Quickly As Possible: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Terms and conditions there’s all kinds of stuff you can do with visuals.

People get hung up on the logo all the time. My advice, if it’s your first course and your first course website, don’t even do a graphical logo. Just do a text-based logo, which is just, means like even, I don’t know if it’s still this way, but the Facebook logo. Is a certain white font on a blue background, and it just says Facebook in the font.

It’s just the words, right? You can get fancy with it later. If it’s a personal brand, your logo is your name written in a nice, heavy font for, that’s your title font for your website. You do not need to spend $300 and three months of time designing a logo for a version you 

Kurt Von Ahnen: wanna change anyway. 

Chris Badgett: What are some AI just unlocks for, that you would recommend to help with speed?

Kurt Von Ahnen: You nailed the one about am I missing content or am I missing key elements? The other thing that I stress to people when it’s depending on what type of training it is, it’s, don’t forget where you are. You are the expert and you’ve forgotten more. Then, these people could, learn in some cases, you wanna make sure you cover the basics.

You wanna make sure that you don’t skip over the basics and then leave your student lost and what the heck am I doing here? A perfect example of this is like in technical training for motorcycle training. What I used to do for a living, we used to have these advanced diagnostic courses for electronics for technicians to take.

But then when I actually went to teach the courses in person, I realized half the technicians really don’t know. You know how the diagnostic tool actually works. They don’t know how a multimeter works, so we had to make a multimeter training course so that they would understand the basics so they could do the advanced.

Don’t get hung up when you’re trying to make your first course thinking that you gotta wow people and knock it outta the park and come up with these crazy great ideas. Use AI to be like, what’s the basis, what’s, what are the basic concepts that I need to include so I don’t leave the my learner behind?

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah. Yeah. ’cause it’s, that’s part of the expert’s curse is you for, you forgot how to teach to beginner’s mind, if you will. For you out there watching and listening. If you wanna launch an online course fast, I recommend getting the litmus free plugin. And if you want to do the automated e-commerce, get the Earth bundle, it’s our lowest tiered plan.

If technology is your struggle and you’re not in the WordPress game or the website game, reach out to Kurt. He is at Manana Nomas. Also, Kurt is online for our Ask Me Anything Call. So if you’re intrigued by this episode every Thursday, if you just google Lifter LMS community events, you’ll find the calendar page that has the, link to join and register to attend one of those.

So if you’re experiencing some friction and you’re you just want to talk to us, come to the Ask Me Anything Call. Anything else you wanna say, Kurt, about Manana, namas and who you help? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: It’s, the fun part about Manana Nomas is we really do focus on two different verticals. One is advanced enterprise level e-learning conversions from purpose-built SCOR sites to enterprise training websites.

Like we love that work, but we backfill our entire calendar with people that are. Startups and entry level businesses and just getting people into the space. ’cause I really love sharing what we can do. That’s why we run the WordPress meetup in town. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kurt, thank you for coming back on the show.

We’re definitely gonna have to do this again soon. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And we will catch you on the next episode.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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