How to Deal with the Failed Online Course Business

In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen elaborates on the notion that an online course that has “failed” is typically merely an unfinished endeavor. He explains that a lot of creators quit too soon after making their debut, particularly if they just have a few students or no sales, but those first results are only feedback. Kurt claims that poor positioning, communicating to non-decision makers, focusing on the incorrect audience, and having irrational expectations brought on by internet marketing hype are all common causes of failure.

He emphasizes that the key is to understand the course’s purpose, the problem it solves, and how it adds value. Purchasing software, rebuilding websites, or pursuing new technologies won’t solve the fundamental issue. Additionally, he emphasizes that development is slowed by perfection. Learning from the market is delayed when months are spent revising material or waiting for the “perfect” launch.

Rather, developers ought to release an initial version, collect input, and refine it over time. Kurt also draws attention to the emotional aspects of failure, such as humiliation and impostor syndrome, and he urges artists to seek support from masterminds, communities, and collaborations.

His own experience demonstrates that perseverance, iteration, and clarity are more important than quick success since a failing course may become a lucrative, even six-figure, enterprise once the proper audience and sales strategy are discovered.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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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 LifterLMS, 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 LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Kurt Von Onin from Manana Nomas. Kurt also works directly with Lifter LMS. You’ve probably seen him around at some of our live calls and events. Today we’re gonna get into a different way to think about and deal with a failed online course project.

Things aren’t necessarily what they seem. We’re gonna give you some ideas of how to think about and react and work with a project that isn’t quite working out. But before we dive in, first, Kurt, welcome back on the show. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Dude, again, thank you so much for having me. It’s always great to have a chat with, Chris Badgett.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. You, were just on a team meeting we had that we do monthly at Lifter LMS and there’s actually a section of the meeting where we talk about failures. And I got this idea from some podcast somewhere where a parent advice to other parents was. To basically ask their kids, not just, Hey, what’d you, what went great today?

But also what’d you fail at today? And turn failure not into a, something that you don’t talk about that you hide or you diminish, or you denial and pretend didn’t happen. But let’s talk about failure. So let’s, in the game of entrepreneurship and online business and creating education products, there is a massive amount of failure.

Failure could be the giant goose egg, which is zero. Like 

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, 

Chris Badgett: site didn’t launch or it launched and zero people bought. Some people call that crickets. But there’s other kinds of failure too, where you’re really excited and you think you’re gonna get like a hundred students and you get one or three.

These kinds of things happen a lot. But to start the conversation, let’s keep it philosophical at first and talk about failure as feedback and not something to just be shame shameful about, or pretend it doesn’t exist, or just like quickly tap into entrepreneur A DHD and move on to something else, like in your life, particularly in your professional life, but maybe in other areas too.

How do you. Approach failure when it rears its ugly head. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, I am John Maxwell, certified in leadership and speaking and training. And while I haven’t grown my business based on the John Maxwell certification, I do embrace a lot of the ideologies and the theories that John Maxwell put forth. I like I, truly consider him a mentor in that space.

He has a book called Failing Forward. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: And I, will say and, you know this about me, but maybe the listeners and viewers don’t, I have a list a, distinguished list of failures in, in my background and I’ve learned from them and it’s given me a tenacious, sense about how I address things now, because there was way too many times when something failed and I gave up.

Instead of learning from it and developing it and knocking it out of the park, I turned it off and then a year later, two years later, someone else came along, took the idea and knocked it outta the park and became a millionaire. Right now I’ve had that three separate times that I could literally point to and say, here’s what I had, here’s what I gave up, and here’s what someone else did.

And it was exactly what I did. But it didn’t succeed. And now I look at things and I go, I wanna fail. I want to fail. I wanna fail as quickly as possible. I wanna learn from the failure and I wanna optimize the failure for future growth and to move forward. And that’s why I think maybe it’s my age, but maybe that’s why some of my projects now seem from the outside to look like they’re succeeding but, they’re not succeeding from chance or happenstance? They’re succeeding because I went, okay, let’s try this. Oh, it failed. How do we tweak it? How do we move it? How do we, get things to go? You give yourself six months, eight months, nine months to find success with something, and sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes you need to fail, and then you like recalibrate and then relaunch, and then maybe you find the sweet spot.

The product market fit, you always talk about that’s like, your thing. Your thing is product market fit. Let people pull it from you. But the problem with a lot of people starting up is you don’t have, man my dog’s excited. You don’t, have, you don’t have something where people are pulling it from you.

You’re still in the phase of trying to offer it, right? And so you’re trying to offer it, but nobody’s buying. You’re getting those crickets. So you have to analyze where does that failure come from? Don’t be upset, don’t get up don’t, get dejected and quit. Tweak it like recalibrate and figure out what is the success.

Chris Badgett: I like that there’s so much in what you just said. And, I just wanna mention one of the last episodes we did, we talked about speed, how to launch a course fast. Yeah. This is why it’s important, because you wanna reduce the time to getting the market feedback, whether that’s failure. Modest win or runaway success, but those all are of equal value in terms of feedback and not minimizing the fact that you failed.

Just do it as quickly as possible and product market fit and minimum viable product and things like this come from a seminal book about startups called the Lean Startup, where they really built the. A methodology around how to be lean, how to move fast, how to be agile, how to pivot, how to work with failure, all these terms.

I gotta give credit to Eric Reese, who like, codified all that 20 years ago. And I’ll just share a personal story in terms of failure. Like you, you also mentioned that. You have a project that’s successful and then whether it’s your local community or perception online or whatever, people are like, oh, he’s so successful, or whatever, and we get that.

Like at Lifter, LMS Lifter, LMS was like my fifth online business that I tried to start, did I stop after I started doing video marketing for local Main Street businesses where I got two, three clients. It wasn’t a goose egg, but. No, I just kept pivoting and, kept trying things when I did like an affiliate marketing business and tried to get into that.

But there’s lessons I learned from all my quote failures. Do I use video marketing? Yeah, we’re doing it right now. We’re creating videos. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Do I, do affiliate marketing? Yes. It’s like a side thing we do as part of lifter LMS and recommending tools that we like and trust. So oftentimes you can take a failure isn’t necessarily always burn the entire house down and build a new house in the location.

Sometimes it’s just a renovation and a, pivot. That’s the whole point of the pivot. Maybe it’s, the who you’re helping. Maybe it’s your messaging. Maybe it’s. Maybe your course was too overwhelming and too big and felt like such a, too big of a time commitment. Maybe your marketing strategy, you might have a great product, but the way you wanted to go to market wasn’t optimal for that particular project.

There’s so many reasons and everything is like a test. That’s an experiment. You never know. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, think it’s, super important to. We made the episode about launching a course quickly and I don’t wanna launch, like I don’t wanna group everything together, right? But we made the episode about launching a course quickly, and that’s super important.

Get your minimal viable product out, get something going, build your tribe. But I think what a lot of people run into Chris. And this is from my agency experience, is people make an investment. And maybe they think the investment is to launch for the first year. They give themselves this like fake deadline and they go, oh, okay, I’m gonna get the hosting for a year.

I’m gonna get access to the platform for a year. I’m gonna get these plugins for the CRM for a year. And they build whatever they want to build. But the thing is, it’s gonna take ’em two, three months to build what they really want. So now, they’ve got nine months that they’re gonna launch, and a lot of people don’t launch the way that we advise to like like, you’ve got content with La Musk has content about pre-selling and pre-launching and all these things, but a lot of that doesn’t get addressed.

A lot of it, a lot of what we talk about doesn’t actually get action pe people take two, three months to, to get a product on and then they try to promote it. Then it’s that goose egg. It’s that, and it’s hard. It is hard. And then people get dejected and then they pause for a month or two, and then they, say, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna recommit.

And then they get back into it and the next thing you know, the year is up. And they go I failed. You didn’t fail. You created something pretty awesome. You just don’t have the audience yet. You just don’t have the people that you need to have that, that give it life, that give it energy, that give you the feedback, that give you the ability to grow.

And that’s the hard part. So from an agency perspective, I run into this a lot. Where I have people that they’ve fallen for the hype. And I, think maybe, I’m, a little too aggressive on this I’ve seen the commercials, I’ve seen the ads that come to my own feed that say courses are dead and webinars are dead, and you just need an, you just need a mobile application.

You’re gonna make five grand a week. And it’s that’s not realistic. It’s, you have to make a product, you have to develop the product, develop an audience that wants to consume the product, and then you have to take that feedback. And redirect from there. And it takes time. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. One of my favorite things when I’m like thinking about a business strategy or whatever, is I like to think of what are the assumptions?

Because a lot of what you’re doing as a course creator is you make, you’re making an assumption of who it’s for, what the result is, the best way to teach it, how you’re gonna sell it, what your website needs to be effective. It. They’re not facts. They’re all assumptions. There are some facts like, yes, you do need a website.

Yes, you do need to have a course. Yes, you do need to connect your Stripe account, but a lot of entrepreneurship is assumptions and then challenging those assumptions and when the assumption gets challenged and the result is negative IE failure, that’s just something to fix or try something different or pivot 

Kurt Von Ahnen: when.

When I first did, so here’s a little transparency with Kurt. When I, first did the John Maxwell certification, it wasn’t cheap. I don’t want anyone to think that’s cheap and it was $5,000 and you had to go to Orlando. So for me, that was another 2,500 bucks, right? So I’m out $7,500 to go to this John Maxwell thing, but that’s not the end of the expense.

The expense before that was the time. The training, the courses, the online stuff to go to the in-person practicum to get certified in person by John Maxwell and the staff. So overall, we’re gonna say it’s, maybe it’s a $15,000 value, right? That that, you’re throwing out there. And when I look at that and, then I look at the people that took the training.

So there’s 3000 people a year that are going into this thing. And, everyone thought I’m just gonna make a leadership course and I’m gonna be a leadership coach, and I’m gonna go back to my hometown and I’m gonna be the the, I’m gonna be the thing and I’m gonna make a bazillion dollars doing this.

And if you don’t, put in the work, put in the reps. Build your own tribe, your own audience, your own email list, your own, you don’t have anything. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: it takes time. 

Chris Badgett: That snowball thing is very real. How it starts small. That’s why if somebody does a course and going from zero to one is like super hard and respectable.

So even only if you got one customer, that’s still not a zero. And it reminds me. I was so impressed. We shared it at our team meeting at lifter LMS today about Marcus Carter, who teaches English to Spanish speaking world. And once he had to shut the doors to his in-person language learning schools in Spain, he pretty much said I’m not stopping until I figure this out.

He already had the validation that like people, he’s good at teaching English. He’s been doing it for a long time, and. But I love the acronym focus follows Follow one course until Success yeah. ’cause it’s easy to get distracted and be like, okay, I’m gonna try a course that didn’t work. Okay, now I’m going to become a coach.

Okay, that didn’t work. Now I’m gonna do an AI startup that didn’t work. Now I’m gonna be a vibe coder. Now I’m gonna write a book. Now I’m gonna do a newsletter. And when, and I get that, like as an entrepreneur, I love all those things. I play in all those sandboxes, but. One of the number one things that’s made Left our All Mess work is just a relentless focus in never giving up.

And even when we first launched it, our initial plan was we’re gonna get a hundred customers and if we don’t, we’re gonna shut it down and do something else. And we got 42, which is awesome, but I was like, let’s not shut it down, let’s keep going. And it was very painful. There’s a saying in entrepreneurship.

I don’t know how mathematically true this is, but when you really commit to entrepreneurship at least I’m talking in the online business context. It’s known that it if it’s gonna work, it’s gonna take three years to replace your day job. It took me five so part of it is just, okay you’re, not that smart, or you didn’t quite figure it out what you are is relentless and consistent and open-minded and all those things really stack up over time.

It’s one of the reasons why I believe there’s an argument that you shouldn’t, you should. Follow your passions or you shouldn’t follow your passions, you should follow the money. And both have like valid points. But what I’m saying is if you need to be consistent and show up month after month, year after year, decade after decade, it probably should be in alignment with your passions.

Like I know you’re passionate about leadership power sports website technology and marketing and online business and all these things like. It’s okay to have multiple passions, but staying the course is a big part. And the first year of a business is so fragile, like you’re, there’s a reason why like a shark or whatever has like a hundred babies and one will live, right?

Because it takes a while to get a fully formed thing that’s gonna survive and stand the test of time. And it’s confusing because. A lot of the marketing out there for like software tools, for online education stuff, they do nothing but and we’re guilty of this at lifter. LMS is show like the success stories.

Oh, this person got 500,000 and this does happen. Those are the, runaway successes. But you don’t hear about the people that went from zero to one. And then maybe the second year they got 20 people while still working a full-time job trying to figure this thing out and support their family.

And then maybe year 3, 4, 5, that finally takes off. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And I can see people when I talk to ’em, which this is the more common story for, successful projects, is it was a grind. It took a lot of time, it took a lot of failure, it took a lot of pivots. Some dark nights of the soul, blood, sweat, and tears, failed assumptions.

But when they can finally say I made it like, this is my income or career, it’s it’s really great to see, but you can also see the scars and the pain on their face from what it took to get there. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, don’t wanna make it sound like it’s torture, but I haven’t listened to him in a long time, but I used to listen to Gary Vaynerchuk a, a fair bit, like when I would travel and commute a lot, and one of the things that he would say in his messaging that really, stood out to me, that really struck me hardcore was he would say people are looking f like they want to be the next Facebook.

They want to be the next ex. They want to be the next whatever. He’s you don’t need that. He’s if you’re trying to buy your freedom, what does your freedom cost? If you’re in a job that cost a hundred thousand dollars, like your job’s a hundred grand a year, let’s just say your job’s a hundred grand a year.

What are you spending on commuting? What are you spending on this? Whatcha are you spending on that? What do you really need to make off of a project? And so if you can turn 50 grand off of a project. You’ve done well, if you can turn 60 grand off a project you’ve done well, if you can turn six figures you’re, kicking ass.

And if you get better than that, then the sky’s the limit. And so in my space as an agency I’ve worked with a couple of clients that have. Thousands of students. And that’s always interesting, right? Like, I get into a website and I say, okay, we’re gonna migrate, or we’re gonna build, or we’re gonna do and we’re gonna bring in these 3,600 users.

And in my mind, I think to myself, oh my god $499 a year times 3000 people like, this is revenue. People are making revenue. And then I work with a startup, and the startup is I’m trying to sell my course for $49. 

And they gotta get to that first $49, or they gotta get to that fifth $49.

And when they get to the top, what when they get to the first 10, if you have 10 paying students in your course, you’re kicking butt, you’re doing great. And, you just gotta keep moving forward. But, I think it’s. People have these unrealistic expectations, maybe based on some marketing that’s out there like, school and the other platforms that are out there that talk about hey, jump on here and, get access to our marketplace and get thousands of users.

And that’s just not reality. If you want to build something that’s got longevity, something that has teeth, something that has traction, it’s gonna take some work and some skin in the game. 

Chris Badgett: And it takes time to build a personal brand too. Yeah, absolutely. So if, particularly if the content is tied to you as the subject matter expert and you’re somewhat newish to the internet, that’s gonna just take time.

It’s funny ’cause at Lifter we’re a software company, but I’ve often recognized that people buy the software outta order. I’m glad they buy the software, but I’m glad they buy the software, 

but it would be better if you had you’ve already built the website, you’ve been building your email list for a while, you’ve sat down and like fleshed out on a Google document or whatever, what your course is gonna be.

Maybe done some validation testing, which we’re gonna talk about in another episode, and then. I think I’m ready for software or signing up for, if you’re new, like signing up for web hosting, which is gonna hit your bank account every month it can feel like a moving forward to buy software, but it’s, not, that’s just a means to an end in the sense that it is just a tool and you don’t need to buy the tool until you’re really ready.

But it’s, it can be a trap because you feel like you’re making progress when you buy the green screen or buy the nice camera and then you end up in like this kind of tech overwhelm. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Whereas if you like, really get clear on your offer basically, and validate it and test it, and then go shopping for tools with a minimalist mindset.

Maybe I can use my existing iPhone for my camera that I already have, which is what I’m using right now, 12 years into this business. You, get a, you’re a lot less likely to get seduced by the Siren Song of software because software can become a one of those things that keeps failure happening because, oh, I need to do this CRM marketing automation thing.

I have a background in Infusionsoft, which they used to call Confusionsoft, and I saw it was, like what we’re talking about. You go to the Infusionsoft conference, the people that speak on stage are making $10 million a year and saying it’s all because of Infusionsoft. And they share their campaigns and like their strategies and stuff.

As an agency who operated in the Infusionsoft space, some people would just get way too into the software weeds. And too they’re, creating too much techno tech complexity. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So if you’re listening to this or watching this and you’re, I love software. I like shopping for software.

I like watching demos and I like creating software. We’re about to do a new events thing for lifter LMS, which I’m really excited tonight. I’m gonna be designing the interface for that. I like software, but, slow down. Like people don’t buy your software stack. They buy the, your training and the result that it brings them in their life.

That’s the most important thing. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I can tell you right now the way you started that last section as an agency owner, 

Chris Badgett: you like software. I know you like software. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, I like software. I got a little bit of a disease there. But when I’m dealing with clients. And they’re like, oh, I wanna do a, I wanna do whatever the dream is, if they have assets.

Okay, so newsflash for people that are listening, if I’m interviewing, if I’m doing a needs assessment with a client and the client says. I’ve already got a Google Doc and I’ve got my sections on my courses. I got my lessons laid out. I know what the courses are. I’ve got some graphics here that I’ve already got pieced out.

I’ve already got a website. I want to add this feature to my website, but newsflash. As an agency, I’m charging them less. Yeah. Like they’re getting a smoking hot deal because all I gotta do is ad LMS configure their existing content and put it up for them. And, it just makes it so easy. And then with within a 30 day span, they went from I want to build this to, Hey, we’re gonna launch it.

The, issue though is people that are coming at it from a, piecemeal perspective of I got a website, I got a blog. I think it’d be cool to have a course. They, buy the software and then they get into the course builder and they go, oh so it’s gonna be sections and lessons. And then they start to figure it out.

It’s gonna take ’em two or three months to put something together. But, they have to be aware of that. And that’s if they put the time in, if they don’t put the time in, it’s gonna take longer. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s a, great point. And I’ve, I remember working with clients who, when we got to the table to figure out the project, they literally had all their videos already shot, sitting in a Google Drive folder, like everything is ready to roll.

When you do that with an agency, you’re setting up the relationship to have the highest possible positive outcome for the least amount of money, and you trust the agency, particularly if you’re non-technical, to guide the tool selection. Be mindful of your budget and so on. And that’s like a dream.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Because we say in, in agency work, the biggest challenge is always the content. Getting the content from the 

Kurt Von Ahnen: client, getting the content. Yeah. Yeah. In a real life experience. And, I can call her out by name ’cause she’s a really great client of ours. Art of Makeup is a lifter LMS website that we made and.

They initially were gonna launch within three months. They already had content. Everything was great, everything was on schedule, everything was going. I thought everything was going wonderfully. And then about 45 days into the project, they said we wanna reshoot all of our content. We’re gonna hire a professional videographer and we’re gonna go to LA and we’re gonna make all this new content.

And it put us back about nine months on the project. Now the end result ended up being stellar. If you go to the R to make up. Com website. You look at it, it’s a beautiful website, and the videos are phenomenal. Like, everything’s topnotch. Everything is topnotch. But the reality is, did that need to happen to launch the course, or could they have launched the course within two to three months, made revenue and then done a version two a year or two later?

Chris Badgett: If I could wave a magic wand, I would’ve preferred the latter to Hey, let’s just put this thing in the market. Because then you start the branding engine. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

How to Deal with the Failed Online Course Business: You 

Chris Badgett: start practicing your launch methodology, which you can then build on. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And hindsight’s always 2020 in the end we have a beautiful website.

It’s part of our portfolio and it’s a wonderful piece, but it’s one of those use case situations. When I talk to clients, I’m like, if you have content. We can launch you pretty quickly. If you, wanna redo the content and you want to put back the calendar, we can do that, but that’s gonna increase your costs as well.

Or something as simple as you’ve gotta renew the things that you’re subscribing to. So whatever the website’s built with that’s a nine months or a year into another year’s worth of subscriptions and renewals. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. We’ve talked about software complexity, we’ve talked about content complexity, is what you’re talking about there.

Another one that leads to a lot of failure that I’ve noticed in this space is actually the marketing and sales strategy. ’cause a lot of, particularly people who sell solutions in that space, whether that’s training or. Tools that help you. The software or the, those marketing and sales tactics, strategies, tools are often pitched as a magic bullet.

Oh, you just need this one perfect ad for Facebook and you’re good to go. Or, this is how you build a giant email list and then you just need 2% to convert. Or this is the perfect social media marketing campaign or. But there is no perfect. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: No. 

Chris Badgett: And that whole thing of like software, shiny object syndrome happens in marketing strategy too.

And my advice there is to pick the one that works the best for you. That’s most in, alignment for you. So if you’re already a YouTuber with a following, sure, maybe YouTube ads is a great idea, but you don’t have to do that. And then ads on seven other platforms or. Get into all these different content marketing strategies, like you gotta get one working before you move on to another.

This goes back to the failure thing. If the ads don’t work, pivot, try something else. Pivot again. If you get three strikes, you’re out, change to a different thing. Okay? I’m not gonna do paid ads, I’m gonna do relationship marketing. I’m gonna do sponsor stuff, or guest posting, or guest podcast appearance.

If that doesn’t work, then move over to the, he, the heavy lift of organic content marketing and so on. But you can’t do all those things at once simultaneously. And every time a new thing drops, you just, it create, that creates a lot of chaos and entropy that you almost forget that you’re a course creator and you’re just like a marketing and sales person at that point.

’cause all you’re consuming is you’re looking for the magic bullet, the needle in the haystack, if you will. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s it’s really interesting the way that you started to phrase that, because every. Use case is different, Chris. And that’s, I think that’s the part that a lot of people get lost on is that their use case is unique and that they’ll try to emulate or they’ll try to copy or they’ll try to they’ll try to say, oh if I wanna learn from someone that’s successful, I’m gonna learn from someone that’s successful.

I’m gonna try and duplicate what they did. But your use case might be different. Your audience is definitely gonna be different. And so things change based on use case. It’s a, completely fluid environment. And so when you talk about ads or organic or podcast guesting, all of those are gonna have different results based on your niche and your tribe.

And so it, it’s very hard. It’s very difficult to have these discussions with people and project their outcome. That’s why I’ve always been suspect of we all get those spam emails, right? We’ll get you to the first page of Google, or we’ll we’ll, get you 15 paid appointments a month, or we’ll get you, it’s you don’t even know what I do for a business yet.

Like it’s all use case derived. And so I, think it’s really important to take stock of who you are, what you’re offering. Who you’re offering it to and what you’re communicating as your offer. And if all of that seems to fall within alignment, maybe you just need a little longer of a runway to get things launched and going.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, Time is your friend. And part of that too is to reduce the amount of shame that comes with failure, or even on the other side of shame is grandiosity. So this is grandio. Shame is oh my God, I’m failing so bad. I don’t want anybody to know this sucks. And grandiosity is overconfident.

I’m definitely doing this. This is gonna work. I know exactly what I need to do. But in the middle there’s like this wisdom area and part of the way you move from shame or grandiosity to wisdom is to be open and ask for help. This is why I’m a big fan of masterminding. If you’re a course creator, get yourself in some groups of other course creators and be open about your challenges.

Use the lifter LMS support systems. If you have a question, email us or submit a ticket. Come to the live calls. Yeah. Ask for, help and and just be open and honest. ’cause I heard Dan Martel once say ask for help, get him an investor. And I was like, that’s never gonna work.

And then I got, I found myself in a position where I needed an investor for lifter and I asked for help and I got investment. A new business partner. I’m like, oh my gosh, Dan was right. Ask, for help, and it works. So I don’t know. What do you, if somebody’s failing and they’re feeling shameful or feeling like dug in and overconfident, what would you recommend?

Kurt Von Ahnen: You already touched on one, Chris and, I’m partial. I’m very partial because I run the lifter LMS Mastermind call on Thursdays.

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Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’ll just be blunt and honest on this podcast. We don’t get enough new faces in there. Know, there’s 

Chris Badgett: so many that could come that don’t. And to me that’s like a serious issue.

Like what’s, and I know there’s time zones and all the rest, but 

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, there’s so many that could come that go. We have people from the Netherlands, from Bavaria, I mean like people from all over Europe have come to the call. People from Australia have come to the call. So I’m not gonna give the time zone is the excuse.

Yeah. I’m just gonna give the I’m busy already didn’t get to it. Or maybe it’s the imposter syndrome. Maybe you’re afraid that you’re gonna jump into the call. And you are not ready for the call with all the experts. That’s not. That’s not the flow of the call. So, I, I don’t think people recognize, ’cause they, don’t come.

But you’re invited. You are invited, the call’s open and the call’s open in a Zoom environment where we can do screen shares and we can talk about people’s what is your marketing solution? What are you using for extra third party plugins? What do you like? We talk about all kinds of things.

On the office hours call. And so I think that’s a really good driver. We’ve got a comment right now as we record this live that says, create courses for business instead of creating courses and hoping that it just sells. Yeah. And that’s one option. It’s, one option to say, is your product market fit?

Correct. But the other thing I want to encourage people is. You signed up for lifter LMS to build your course because you want to follow your passion. You want to add value where you think you can add value. So maybe it’s not always for businesses, maybe it is for a certain people group, but maybe you’re having a hard time reaching that people group like I did when I first marketed the Power Sport Academy.

It sat and did nothing for more than two years, and it took me a lot of like real introspection to go, who am I actually marketing to? How am I marketing this? What is my pricing? Does my pricing match the value for what’s being offered? And then literally came to, you know what? Chris said, I need to partner with somebody.

I need to partner with somebody that’s gonna take over the sales, the marketing, and the push through their network to sell my training almost as a subcontractor at that level. But you know what? At the end of the day. I’m still thrilled that I’m actually delivering the content and the training to the people that I wanted to train.

So I’m still able to hit my passion point. I might not be hitting my revenue goals to be really clear because I’m splitting that with a partner, but I’m getting where I need to go. I’m getting the traction and I’m moving forward on the project. And at this level, I would say it’s very successful. 

Chris Badgett: And that’s awesome.

The partnership with marketing and sales. But a lot of people get stuck in the technology weeds, and I think hiring an agency like Manana, NOMAS or other, there’s other agencies out there too. We have the Lift Lifter, LMS experts page. But if you’re in the tech weeds, you don’t have to stay there. And I know it’s hard when, particularly if you’re brand new and you don’t have a budget.

One of the reasons why I knew as an example, that your Powersport Academy should and would work is like you were paid to do that kind of work in the real wor in the quote, real brick and mortar world. Yeah. Guy’s got the skills, guy’s a great communicator. Technology’s not a problem for this person.

So it’s something else. And then you found your way to unlock that. But. For a lot of people, they do struggle with the technology or get overly obsessed with it. And manana, NOMAS is not like a dirt cheap agency, you guys, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: no. 

Chris Badgett: It’s not where you serve the market you serve, but even if you’re a startup and you’ve never built a WordPress website before, you can go to fiverr.com.

Get somebody else to set up your website for a very low amount of money. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And it’s not gonna be, you can’t go in there expecting the white glove and consultative experience that you would get from an agency like M Noma. But you can still, even with limited budget, get the website out of the way and just be okay with it not being 100% exactly what you wanted and just move on.

’cause you have other things to get going and 

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, 

Chris Badgett: pivot and test. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s it. It’s so amazing to me because. When, you first came to me, Chris, and you said you should run the mastermind call or you run the office hours, I was like, I’m not an expert. And you were like, oh, no, you are you’re, a WordPress power user.

You need to run the call. After I ran the call, I was like, oh my goodness, I guess I do know what I’m doing. ’cause some of these people really don’t know what they’re doing. 

Chris Badgett: And you’re great with people. You’re wonderful with people, and you know how to manage a room, which is also a skill that you get as a manager and a leader, which of course, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: but that’s, the beauty of the lifter.

LMS echos sphere, right? Is like people can get in. Whether you’re an expert or not, it’s like the platform works. You can get your course up, you can run your membership. There’s support to help you get where you need to go. If you have questions that go a little bit beyond what support would normally cover, we’re probably still gonna help you or at least point you in the right direction.

And there’s a really good chance for success with this platform that you’re not gonna see with other things. 

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Land the plane here. I would just encourage you out there listening or watching to embrace failure as like a, it’s actually a good thing and there’s so many, you want to get a lot of failures along the way and then just retool do something different.

Try to fix what’s broken. It’s not like it, a failure is just like this binary thing oh, it worked or it didn’t. It’s which part? Which part failed? Or. What’s good, what’s not good? Let’s work on the not good try and, just think of it more like a scientist and an experimenter, particularly like in your case, if you have already been paid in your life, in your niche and on your topic, either even if it’s not a lot of money, but you have delivered value in that space, like you have that validation.

So that’s not the issue. It’s not like you failed. Because you don’t know your stuff. It’s, something else. And those that requires a lot of experimentation to unlock that. And 

Go ahead. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: That’s where that imposter syndrome really takes over though, Chris, it wasn’t. Oh, this is so hard to say, right?

’cause it makes me sound like I’m patting myself on the back. But I was the, North American training manager for Ducati, which put me in charge of Canada, United States, Mexico. And then I led the sales training internationally so that put me in Spain, France. Italy, like I was traveling the world doing this whole thing.

And then I went to Suzuki, recruited me and they said, we love what you did at Ducati. Could you do that for Suzuki? And so I started working with Suzuki, and then when I went independent, there was that, oh, I couldn’t even keep a corporate job. I failed. I lost. You know what I mean? And when I built the Power Sport Academy, it was like, I think I have some really good stuff here.

I’m just not sure. It was a year, into the failure, 18 months into the failure. I was like, I don’t understand it. Like I know that I have the best training content period in the powersport space. Like I remember I had a really frustrating call with you one-on-one on the phone. Yeah. And I was like, I have the best training content in the country.

Like I know that, I know dealers are gonna come in and they’re gonna take the training and minimum they’re gonna double their service sales minimum. If they did a million dollars in sales, they’re gonna do $2 million in sales next year. I still couldn’t get people to sign up for the course, and that was very, difficult.

That was hard to swallow and, I had overcome the, I had overcome the imposter syndrome. I had acknowledged my expertise, but I still had this failure. And it was, I realized, you know what? I can market to service managers and service writers, but I’m not, marketing to the people that are actually gonna swipe the credit card and buy the training.

I realized I got the wrong people. I’m trying to sell this to the wrong people and I can’t seem to reach the right people. And that’s when that partner came in and that’s when things made sense. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and that just brings the point right home. It wasn’t like a binary, oh, it failed or it was a success. It was like you just had a part in the machine of it all that had to be fixed.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then once you got that, everything started unlocking 

Kurt Von Ahnen: dude, that project is on track to be a six figure project. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: And so in the terms of Luter, LMS is $1,500 a year for the Infinity bundle. That’s, a small cost of doing business in terms of what the budget has become.

But for the first five years that 1500 bucks would’ve been like, oh my God, 1500 bucks. Another year’s coming 1500 bucks, another year’s coming 1500 bucks. And now five years in, I’m like 1500 bucks. Who cares? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s why we do the 50% off your first year at Lift R Mess. ’cause we know it’s gonna take longer than you think.

You’re gonna have to go through those failure pivots. You might get a modest win. And you’re still very budget conscious and so on. So we do our best. So the key takeaway here, if you’re watching this, is when you experience failure, don’t give up. Ask for help, reach out to lifter LMS. We have our tickets, our live calls, and so on.

If you need help. With the website front, hire an agency like Man Noma, and just keep moving forward. One foot right in front of the other. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. I want to thank you, Kurt, for coming on the show and doing this series. We’ve got more to come. Next up we’re gonna get into validation.

So if you want to. Decrease. I can never guarantee there will be zero failure. But if you really want to decrease the fa the likelihood or the odds of failure or the extreme cases of failure we’re gonna share our best ideas on validation and there’s a lot to go over. So you’ll likely see that in the next episode.

Kurt, thanks for so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing all you know and your stories. And we’ll see you in 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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