LMScast with Chris Badgett

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this episode, Chris Badgett explains how AI will significantly reshape online courses by making creation faster, cheaper, and more accessible, while also increasing competition and lowering average quality due to an influx of generic AI-generated content. He emphasizes that although those who use AI as a co-pilot, combining it with their own brand, voice, and expertise, will stand out and deliver higher-quality courses, those who rely solely on AI will suffer. He highlights that the value of information diminishes as it gets simpler to provide, and the true premium moves to human components like coaching, community, accountability, and change. AI will also make it possible for more flexible course delivery, intelligent student assistance, and customized learning experiences. AI may serve as a tutor by assisting students, bridging knowledge gaps, and dynamically modifying curriculum. Additionally, operational and student support systems will become more sophisticated, with AI assistants proactively assisting students, providing real-time answers to inquiries, and even stepping in when students are ready to lose interest. It will be crucial for creators to post public material and maintain visibility as marketing and discovery grow more competitive and move toward AI-driven platforms. Additionally, Chris promotes openness and human supervision while cautioning about ethical issues, including authenticity, false information, and data privacy. Ultimately, his main point is that creating a comprehensive, AI-augmented education company with a human connection at its core is more important for success in the AI future than simply selling courses. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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 LMS Cast. My name’s Chris, and today we’re gonna do a solo episode. We’re gonna talk about AI and course creation, but it’s gonna be a little different than probably what you’ve been thinking already or what you’re already seeing happening. We’re gonna look into the future and look at 10 ways. AI is gonna be different in the life of the course creator. What’s gonna change in the course creation economy because of ai, things are already changing. Things are already happening now, but we’re gonna look a little further out into the future. And the reason this is important is when you think about. How AI is changing online education. It opens up opportunities for you. It also creates risks for you. So the more that we can see what’s next and get a feel for what’s coming, the better we can prepare to take advantage of the opportunities and remove the risks. Where are we at today? AI is already here. It’s also not something that is equally. Used or distributed. There’s early adopters, certain types of people who are leveraging and using AI a lot more than others. Some may not even be using it at all as course creators, but most techie folks are in some ways experience experimenting, playing with ai, using it at work. So in terms of course creation, we’re already seeing course creators. Use AI to help create outlines, to create lesson drafts or talking points for slides, or even slides themselves. Create quiz questions from a body of material to do support in some ways with chatbots. We’re using AI and video editing. This podcast is actually edited in a tool called DE Script, which has AI video editing we’ve been using for a long time. People are using AI in marketing copy, and, but still most course, creators are under using it. This is like the early days of email marketing or social media and even online courses themselves. So the first prediction I have for you of what’s coming in the next five years with AI and course creation is that. Course creation is gonna get a lot faster. Cheaper. Cheaper and easier. This is good and bad. It’s bad because it lowers the barrier to entry so that kind of, anyone can create a course. But it’s good for people who are not trying to replace themselves entirely by ai, but they use it to create a small team effect so that they can get things done faster. Video editing curriculum, design, lesson content, using AI to accelerate those things. Course creation gets faster and cheaper. The next prediction I have for you is that average course quality goes down but the top tier gets a lot better because of ai. So the, low end of the, course creation market actually gets worse. And the reason that is, is that course creators will, or entrepreneurs will chase opportunities and create what’s known as AI slop and just see an opportunity, oh, here’s a hot topic. I’m gonna have AI a hundred percent make a course for me and I’m gonna sell it. And it’s gonna sound like every other generic AI generated course. On that topic. So the low end course creation, because of the barrier to entry, is actually going to get worse. We’re gonna get flooded with more and more lower quality AI slop content. We’re already seeing this on social media and YouTube where AI content is flooding. And so it creates more noise but the creators at the top end of the market who are leveraging AI in an intelligent way are actually creating even better courses, higher production value videos, websites, and so on. The next prediction I have is that. The personal brand aspect becomes even more important in the future of online education or as an education entrepreneur. So personal brand has always been a thing. You have one, whether you choose to accept that idea or not. I’ve always been a big fan of not hiding behind a website and really putting yourself out there as much as you can. In your online education business as a teacher, as a coach, as an entrepreneur, as a topic brand personality, all these things are really important. They’re just becoming more and more important. Humans have never been more lonely and isolated because of technology. So the desire to connect in an educational format with a real human and not just with robots and artificial intelligence is only gonna increase. Your personal brand really matters, and even if you’re augmenting yourself with AI to be more productive increase your production value and so on. I recommend just keeping that personal aspect of you in the business and that could be things like just having an, even if you use a lot of AI in creating your course, you could have an ask me anything office hours once, a once a month, and that keeps the human in, that keeps the personal brand strong do not let AI slowly take over your everything and now your personal brand is completely gone from your online education company. The next piece related to the human side is that coaching community and accountability becomes more premium in the course creator education offer stack. So what I mean by that is as content becomes more and more commoditized with ai, it’s the other aspects of learning, the coaching, the community, the accountability systems, the peer-to-peer connection the masterminding if you will, the social learning things like memberships, cohorts. Private communities certifications that include a, human aspect of certifying this. This makes premium content in the future. So information at the end of the day wants to be free. And what I mean by that is your course content, the information in your training. There’s much pressure on that. The, just the info part of what you do is a, in some ways a commodity. You can have unique ideas and unique insights and blend unique things together, but at the end of the day, information wants to be free and in an AI world, which is unlocking information at scale the things that are valuable going forward or add more value or premium value. Are the human things. That’s the private coaching, the group coaching, the online and in-person communities, the event-based learning, any kind of social learning or certification and continuing education that requires a human component. This is why we have all those great tools in lifter LMS, so that. You can, what we’ve said since the beginning of lift drill LMS is you can scale the human touch with robotics. We’ve always said that, and what that means is even before AI was a big deal, we believe that the technology of building a website, using WordPress, using lift drill LMS will accelerate you, but you are still a human in the machine and we are scaling the human, not replacing the human. So my next prediction is that personalized learning will become the new standard. So what this looks like, some call it adaptive learning, but essentially if we look back to the old in-person classroom education style learning is not very personalized. There’s a teacher in front of the class, it’s one to many. There’s instruction and mass, everybody’s hearing the same thing at the same time, at the same pace, taking the same tests. What personalized learning is where and this is where AI provides a big opportunity and unlock, is the learning can adapt to the learner. So if there’s knowledge gaps that one individual’s having. The AI tutor as an example, could revisit concepts until that knowledge gap is filled or could adjust quizzing and knowledge assessments based on that learner’s strengths and weaknesses to make sure whatever the gaps are filled. So how does it, what does this look like? It looks like having a, let’s say, a AI tutor on the site. Or even just some kind of monitoring that’s happening, that’s looking at the progress tracking and the grades and the reporting and the content consumption. How much of a video has been watched and so on, where the AI can help guide that learner to more content if they need to, fill in some foundations before they move forward, or if there’s some kind of competency that’s already met. That learner can move forward and move on into something new, something else. So personalized learning is becoming more and more powerful and possible with ai. If you think about it this way, in the old days, there were like three TV channels on a television. If you were lucky enough to have a TV and now. There’s unlimited content on the internet and there’s all these algorithms and AI running in social media or YouTube as an example, just feeding you and adapting to you the type of content that you like to watch or sh have shown interest in. That same thing has not progressed as far in education, but now it is. It’s happening. And we’re just gonna see more and more personalized learning. The next thing that’s gonna really change with AI and education is the student support and the operations of education of the classroom. So what do I mean by that? Think of. An AI tutor. Think about AI agents or assistants or bots that are available to or questions or to proactively help in the tutor context or nudge based on progress. If you think of something like an exit intent popup, by the way, if you’re not using popup maker, you should definitely use that to get more engagement, sales and retention on your lift LMS powered site. But there’s this concept with a popup called an exit intent. So what happens is when the mouse is going to the top left corner to leave. Speaker 5: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.  Speaker: A webpage that creates a trigger that causes a popup. So you can put whatever you want in the message to get people to stay or use a coupon code and complete their purchase. But that kind of, thing applied to learning. You can actually do this with pop-up maker. If someone’s trying to exit a lesson, you can throw a up to encourage them to stay. That’s something you can do with pop-up maker. But now imagine an AI assistant is there notice somebody’s about to abandon the training that they’re supposed to be doing or said they wanted to do. And not only can we throw a popup or a message, we could actually immediately initiate a conversation. That’s the power of AI in terms of responding to user behavior on the site. It’s, it basically creates a better learning experience that’s much more scalable. So it’s like AI student support. Ai, LMS Automat automation. So again, we’re scaling the human touch with robotics. There is a lot we wanna do with automation and robotics and artificial intelligence, and having helpful AI assistance in the learning experience. Is, or we’re just gonna see more and more of that. And if you think about how that might change in traditional education I could see the role of the teacher changing to be more of a facilitator and a coach than how they currently work, as an example. So as some of the more operations side of. Education folds into artificial intelligence. The human teacher can be there to more facilitate a process, hold space, provide the human connection even help improve AI systems and so on. But at the end of the day, keeping the humanity in the education will always be important. So in terms of. AI in the future. My next prediction for you is that the marketing side of online courses is gonna get even more competitive. So gone are the early days of online courses where if you happen to be early and you really put up a quality course on a topic, and nobody else had done it. You could scale huge, particularly on a platform like Udemy. In the early days I saw people teaching basic Excel courses making millions of dollars as an example. But as this market gets more and more saturated as artificial intelligence accelerates the marketing and advertising of courses, coaching programs, membership sites and so on, it’s just. It’s gonna get more noisy and harder to stand out. So folks are using AI for their blogs, for making video content, writing emails. Some of the ai innovations in the paid advertising department that are happening right now are really interesting. And in five years I having an AI. Run your ad campaigns and optimize them over time is awesome, but you’re still gonna need to be a human and participate in all that. So AI doesn’t, it doesn’t remove the need for marketing. What it does is it punishes lazy marketing. So if you just create AI slop blog posts with a very lightweight SEO strategy. And you don’t even edit the posts or put your personal touch on it. That’s AI slop. That kind of garbage in, garbage out is not gonna be productive from a marketing standpoint. But those that use AI for ideation, repurposing SEO optimizations, funnel optimization. Testing, split tests playing with hooks and offers and all these things. This is where AI really shines I just wanna throw a plug out there. I use a AI tool called Ojo that’s at ojo.ai. And what’s cool about that is one of, I’ve been in internet marketing for about 20 years now. It’s a couple decades. And one of the early internet marketers I followed, his name was Frank Kern. He’s a great marketer, direct response copywriter interesting guy. He’s done a lot of different things in marketing and information products and ads and all the rest. But a, marketer like Frank, you could probably hire him and pay him like $30,000 to write one sales page for you or. What you could do is, and this is fairly recent, within the last year, you could pay $50 a month for his AI tool that has been trained on how he thinks and his style and his structure of copywriting and creating marketing, advertising, communications, messaging that works and converts. I love using that tool and it’s not like I just put a quick prompt and out comes a sales page. It’s I, won’t say annoying to work with. It’s just time consuming because if you’re gonna do a sales page with ojo.ai, as much as Frank would like to say it’s easy, saves you a bunch of time, which it does do all those things. It’s gonna ask you like 20 questions and dig into you’re, you have to talk to it for about 30 minutes at least to come up with a good sales page. But once you put in that work and you really jam with it as the human and tell your story and your voice and all these things, the actual sales page content is pretty awesome. So that’s but it’s not lazy. It’s not like a one-shot prompt to chat GBT. Hey, build me a sales page about my. Course, and here’s, the, here are the lessons in the course, and you’re done. It’s not like that. It’s, much much more in depth. So use AI to co-pilot, not to replace you. Another trend that we’re gonna see more of is that search and discovery. Is gonna change dramatically beyond traditional Google, SEO. So what do I, mean about Google? SEO? For those who are early adopters of ai, you will have noticed that you use things like a Google search. A lot less than you used to. For me it’s probably about 50% less. So I’m going to tools like chat, GBT, Claude and so on to search for answers, not just Google. So what does that mean? That means as a course creator AI. Tools, the language models will surface your course and people will find you and find links to you or at least discover you there on on a chat with an AI somewhere. In addition to traditional methods like Google search, YouTube, social media, AI is gonna become a bigger and more and more important category. This is where all the opportunity is though. So when you have an AI optimization plan as a course creator, let me share some things that will help you stand out in a, in AI tools. I’m learning this from personal experience and I’m, I found myself actually grateful and really lucky for some decisions I made over 13 years ago at the beginning of lifter LMS. Those decisions are this we have created a podcast. You’re listen to now, we’re somewhere around 500 episodes. Each episode is on average, somewhere around 45 minutes, so I don’t do public math, but whatever, 500 times, 45 minutes, that’s a lot of minutes. All those episodes are out in the public domain where AI can crawl. Information. We also publish our podcast to YouTube. YouTube is al is also ingested by all the ais all the transcripts and all that stuff. And that’s just our podcast. We have over a thousand pages of documentation on how to use lifter LMS. We have about a thousand blog posts and many pages on our website, informational pages. That describe what we do. We have our own social media presence in public discussions. We’ve been involved in on Reddit x YouTube comments and so on. So because we have this large surface area of publicly available open content. Theis know who we are. They found us like we’re not hiding. The problem with course creators is if you put all your intellectual property is basically inside the course or the membership, and the only public thing you have is a sales page and a checkout, you’re almost invisible to ai. This is why it’s important to do things like start a podcast. Start a blog if you do a newsletter. Which I highly recommend publish the newsletter, the historical newsletter, post publicly on your site so they don’t just disappear into the email EERs make, start a YouTube channel. Get involved in conversations and help people. Don’t just be salesy and spammy, but help people in your industry, in your category. For free. In places like Reddit and other public social media places, the AI is gonna be scraping. If you think about grok, that’s the the AI from X. So Grok obviously has optics on everything happening on X. If you’re not doing anything on x, gr is less and less likely to be aware of you. This is all to say that Google search is not going to die. It’s gonna evolve. Google itself has its own AI tools, Gemini, which is awesome. But put, my advice is to put at least as much public content out there that you have behind the paywall so that the AI systems can discover you and help people find you when they’re looking for people, courses, resources. Like you have. The next thing that I see in the next five years in an AI driven world is an increase in bigger issues around ethics, authenticity. And just doing the right moral thing. So what do I mean by that? One, AI today, if you look at. Video generated content or even text content. You can’t always tell if it’s AI or not. So the line, it used to be obvious when something was ai, particularly in in video. But even videos as we call it, a deep fake, is now pretty possible. Like I know I’ve seen some AI content that I thought was real that is actually. No, not, and AI is just gonna get better and better the worst ai today is the worst AI’s ever gonna be. It’s just gonna keep getting better and better which creates issues. So it’s okay to create a digital version of yourself. Whether that’s like a chat bot that’s trained on your knowledge base and helps people it’s okay to. Use AI to help with your writing and so on. But what’s not okay is to mislead people into, people need to know when they’re dealing with a human or not. So I’m not this is just for informational purposes. I’m not a lawyer. Consult a lawyer. Get your own legal advice. But in your terms and conditions and your privacy policy page and everything on your website, I would encourage you to think about if you are using ai, how to incorporate that fact into your terms and conditions and your privacy policy and so on. For example, with a privacy policy, if you are doing coaching and you’re really getting unique personal information from your clients and. You as a coach are leveraging AI to help you process and best coach those clients. If you’re sending that personal information away to another tool like chat, GBT, or wherever that’s a privacy policy issue. So you just need to be upfront around all those things and be careful as well. Like it’s one thing to share that information to an AI tool about a coaching client with zero personally identifiable information. Versus actually like just dumping in their real name, their real email address. They filled out this form with all this data, their company name, all this stuff, and you just push that out into chat GBT servers or whatever. You have to think about all of that. And the other thing too is AI tends to be affirming and it also can hallucinate. So sometimes we, don’t want AI to always be saying, Hey, good job. You’re so smart, you’re doing the right thing. We sometimes we, need to do a little bit of tough love or not always be so positive. I am a very positive person. I love positivity. I like to default positivity of ai. But when it comes to education and learning and coaching, sometimes you have to give a little tough love or a little hard feedback or disagree. With your client or your student. So think about that. And also sometimes AI will hallucinate, it will give incorrect information or straight up lie. And you need to have safeguards in place for that. Some, one way we talk about it is, we call it human in the loop, where a human will always review anything AI creates before. It goes out. Or if you’re not gonna do that, let’s say you have an AI chat bot that’s trained on your knowledge base or whatever you wanna have a big disclaimer up front like, Hey, I am an ai, this is, I’m an AI chat bot. Sometimes my results may not be a hundred percent accurate or whatever. So just think about all that. The authenticity, the ethics and the morals and all that stuff are really important when we’re using AI to accelerate us. We don’t want it to move, it go so fast to a point where we’re crossing ethical boundaries and not being authentic and true. Then my last thing is that AI for the course creators, it’s so much bigger than courses. It’s about building AI augmented businesses. So as I was saying earlier, course content is somewhat becoming commodified and the value of it’s going down and down. So for an example of that is. Why would I sign up for a course about X when I can just ask AI to get the same information or even better information? One reason is the course. There’s only one you teaching that course, and maybe they have a feel a connection to you or you have a unique style and, the people want you. Again, this is why your authenticity and personal brand really matter, but outside of courses. The winners will be building they’ll be accelerated by this AI content and research got, gets a million times easier than it is today. That’s gonna lower the barrier to entry. Like part of me loves course creation because it had a little bit of a barrier to entry. ’cause getting on camera and building a website, a LMS website and everything. It’s not as easy as opening up a social media account and becoming an influencer. So there’s a little bit of a barrier to entry AI’s blowing that all out of the water, even in WordPress. Keep a close eye on WordPress, the new AI stuff that’s coming into core WordPress. Basically where it’s going is you’re gonna be able to chat with your website and what that means is, think of it like chatting to chat GPT, but you’re actually chatting with your website like, Hey, add another service offering for this. Create a new product for that. Change this sales page in this way. Replace that image with different image. So we’re moving to conversational interfaces. We’re already, there in many ways. But we haven’t really done that with our website. You know what the conversational interface for our website was in the past and is today for the most part. It’s a developer, it’s an agency, it’s a freelancer. So what that means is it’s not that AI is going to take jobs from website builders, it’s just that will happen for people that don’t. Evolve as freelancers and developers and agencies to better serve their clients in the AI world. But you’re gonna be able to chat with your website and get stuff done just by talking to your website. This is one of the cool things about WordPress and where the, AI map is and direction is going with that. Scale with automation. And, but don’t over automate, don’t remove the human entirely. Think bigger than just courses is where you can get into the memberships and the course cohorts and the community and the social learning and the the private coaching, the group coaching, the office hours, all of these things are becoming more and more important so that you can build a full stack AI augmented education business. I’d recommend that if you’re behind the curve on ai, just start playing with it. It’s changing so fast. The main thing is just to start playing with it. Try to make videos with it. Try to make images with it. Use it for some research. Use it for some of your content things. Double down on niching, double down on your personal brand. Double down on community and really obsess about human transformation and not just giving people the best information, help your target market transform into the better person that they want to become. So I want to encourage you to own your platform. Build your online education business on your own website, please do that. That’s what WordPress is there for. That’s what lifter LMS is there for. Remember, these are open tools. You know where we’re going with ai. Let’s say you wanted to customize your LMS that’s so much easier on a platform like WordPress that you own and control that’s open source than some closed, hosted, overpriced, expensive course tool. So build your AI augmented education business on your own website with WordPress and lifter LMS. And remember, AI lowers barriers. So it creates a lot of noise, but it also creates opportunity. So chase the high end of the market in terms of becoming an AI augmented. Education entrepreneur that’s building even better learning experiences with the help of ai. So that’s it for this episode. Thank you for listening. Don’t forget with all this AI and technology and website building, it’s good to go outside and take a break and connect with humans in nature and we’ll catch you in the next episode. Take care. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post 10 Ways AI Will Change Online Courses in the Next 5 Years appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this episode, Joe Gorup goes into great detail about how his platform CourseAvenue uses a highly developed AI system called Course Advisor to transform complicated, dense source materials (like technical documents, PDFs, or government regulations) into fully structured, instructionally sound online courses in a matter of minutes. Joe Gorup founded CourseAvenue and is a software developer and innovator in e-learning. Using API interfaces, these courses are then smoothly distributed via LifterLMS, enabling student tracking, course structuring, and lesson development to be done automatically. In contrast to simple AI prompting tools, his system employs a multi-step “AI factory” process that evaluates the length, context, and purpose of the content, applies instructional design frameworks such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, and creates assessments and lessons that are appropriate for various learning levels. He emphasizes that the true issue this addresses is that the majority of subject matter experts such as attorneys, engineers, or compliance officers are not qualified teachers, which makes it challenging and costly to transform their expertise into useful training (which often costs up to $100,000 per course). Beyond creation, the platform offers sophisticated learning analytics that analyze everything from individual question performance to completion rates, assisting in the identification of gaps in learner comprehension and course quality. By utilizing a specially designed bridge to enable bookmarking, scoring, and progress tracking, it also tackles important technical issues like SCORM integration within WordPress. Additionally, it guarantees complete accessibility compliance (WCAG/Section 508), making courses usable for students with disabilities. 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. His name is Joe Goup. He’s the founder of course avenue.com. You gotta see what he is built over@gov.education. Which is a super cool implementation, of course, avenue’s, unique way of creating course content and then feeding it into a lifter LMS site. But first, welcome to the show, Joe.  Joe Gorup: Hey, thanks a lot, Chris. I appreciate the chance to chat with you and the folks. Yeah it’s a wild rule in the LMS and education and content space these days and to throw our hat in the ring and show people what we’re doing. So I appreciate the opportunity. Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a, it is a busy space. There’s literally 500 LMSs out there. AI is taking over the world. The economy’s in flux and everybody’s just trying to figure things out, and you’re doing some really interesting stuff at the intersection of all those. Tell us about gov. Do education, what is it? Why’d you build it? How does it work?  Joe Gorup: Great. It came from the notion of as a company course avenue, which I started early on works a lot in the federal government. People use our core our, authoring tool to build courses on everything from inspecting meat packing plants to ethics compliance for federal lawyers. And so over the years, we just saw this kind of huge gap between there’s dense regulations. Are hard to understand. And then the volume of time it takes to actually educate someone on what is in these regulations. And the one rule of thumb that we’ve used within the federal government is a hundred thousand dollars per course. One of my associates, director of training, yeah, I had a million dollars budget and I had to build 10 courses in one year, stressed out to the to the max. But he did it. And I can I can vouch for that. Yeah. It a fully baked compliance course that, that the, to transform that dense regulations into education. It’s a very expensive process. So with that is my background as, yes, the AI train is, in full of gear here. We were fortunate, one of our one of my co-founders was early on in LLMs having to write Python code before there was any chat. He would talking to LLMs through writing Python code and having Python code, write other Python code. And we started playing around with. The AI with the goal of, I know instructional systems design. I know the time delay, I know the source content, and we saw what could be done not in chat, and what government education represents is the end of, I don’t know, 15 years of experience management and work in the federal government. And it, what we do is we take regulations, use AI to transform it and to make courses so people can actually understand what’s in the regulations and yeah. And so we go from federal register document, a document comes out in the federal government and in about four and a half minutes. We have a course, a marketing page, and a course in lifter. And there could be a lot of skeptics out there. What are those? Oh, how is that possible? And I know in the l in the in the AI space there’s a lot of talk about you can’t use, you can’t really build a course with an LLM and just ai. And I’m here to tell you it, it can be done, but not through a simple chat interface. And so that making sense? Am I  Chris Badgett: That is making sense. You get the document from the government, you full, you fold it through your course advisor software.  Joe Gorup: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: And then it creates course content that you then feed into Lift rails. You’re doing it through an API. Tell us about your setup. Like why does WordPress, and why did you choose WordPress and Lifter as part of this stack? Joe Gorup: WordPress. It was just handy. It’s ubiquitous. We can pull in plugins as needed. The eco, I didn’t have to worry about the e-commerce interface.  Chris Badgett: Yeah,  Joe Gorup: and so on a pure convenience and it as a software engineer, as my background, I cringe a little bit about the underlying WordPress ecosystem because like I know we’re, down in the Willy weeds, we’re down in the PHP, we’re down in the code. And sometimes it gives me heartburn. But from a convenience standpoint, for me to st for me to custom build something, to do everything WordPress does, right? That’s outta the equation. Then we looked at delivering, so we’ve been in the LMS delivery space tangentially, right? Because we have people use our software to build courses. We have our own little mini LMSA little tracking system. And, but we go, we didn’t wanna have to modify ours, and we looked around on the, like most people do Google searching AI things and Lifter came across our desk and we poked it. We used your trial period and we said, Hey, we kicked the tires, but we wanna kick ’em to kick the tires from the bottom. How scalable is it and a thousand courses later using your API? It’s been rock solid. And one of the things we struggled with out in the market was our output from our product is a storm compliant. Or 10 can compliance course. And there’s that little bit of a gap of how do I launch those? And there’s some solutions out there and I didn’t like. We tried one and it was it was klugy and it was funny because we like the lifter API, we know our code and we just need something to bridge the gap. So we wrote a little thin interface layer between a course, avenue course that I can create publishes score. I can put it in my corporate LMS or wherever else I wanna put it. But then we can also just put that in lifter, like you said, we create the lesson, the course wrapper for that lesson. And then. Our course shows up as a little piece that gets launched in track. So all the bookmarking, the things you want, the book especially bookmarking and completion status are the top couple things that we leverage back and forth. It’s a very, so we, again, we love the scalability the fact that we can talk to it. The API has worked to the tune of I think 1,005 courses.  Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s amazing. And can you tell more about how you solved the SCORM WordPress problem of playing SCORM content and tracking in WordPress? Because there are some off the shelf solutions, a couple players out in the market, but it sounds like you built your own, which is awesome and it’s always been a little bit of a friction point between. Because WordPress native people see WordPress as a content management system. So they’re gonna create their content in WordPress, right? Not necessarily separately, but when you do create SCORM files or some benefit to that,  Joe Gorup: right?  Chris Badgett: But as well. So how did you bridge those worlds?  Joe Gorup: What? Having been in this role a long time, the essence of what people want is I wanna launch a course, I wanna know who’s taking the course. So from a, if I had my course perspective hat on I wanna launch, it. So I have to know those per in score, right? It’s just a set of parameters, the CMI data of the for the learner. And so our little, it’s basically a little shim. I, call it, it’s a, it’s not a massive piece of software that’s, below. It’s basically, I know the, I can talk to the lifter side, you’re gonna tell me who this person is, and then we have a little piece that just launches our course, pretending like it’s being launched from a score compliant system. And we have a little, and in there we have a log file. So I can tell you like every time we send a bookmark, so any learner that takes a course in lifter from a course avenue built course, I can tell. I, our log file will tell you the learner id, the learner name, all the communications back and forth, and it’s just, it came natural to us. ’cause that’s, we’re software company and that’s what we do. So we weren’t trying to solve the, I have course builder 3000, the publishes score. ’em and, now I want to use WordPress to connect the two. So we aren’t trying to mill. Ubiquitous. We’re not gonna try to retire on a, scoring to lifter tool, but for anyone that uses our product, they can press a button and with our little, with a plug, with a little course avenue plugin, your course and Lifter will communicate back and forth. We will set the completion status back to lifter. And as they’re going through, the course of the bookmarks are all stored, which is usually that’s the, those are the main things people want. And then if I could plug one more piece to that puzzle what we know is people like bookmarking, they like completion status and they like scoring. And the one problem it’s, it goes deep into the whole scoring of 2004 revision you on. I wanna know. Is everyone missing? Question five, is the question bad? I have knowledge checks Are PE what Most everyone puts knowledge checks in their courses or they should, or they like to question. How do you, how are people doing? Do you have any notion of not you got storing ’em ’cause they’re just knowledge checks. Course avenue we have for years we’ve had this module called Analyze. Where we, track that. And so the people that take our courses in Lifter, if they launch the course with, I can, if I look at my analyze reports, I can tell you, I can tell you how many seconds someone took, to answer a question. We have a whole suite of learning analytics down to that individual learner, taking an individual question. Data, which is extremely helpful. One of our customers is the Federal Aviation Administration. Medical doctors that wanna be certified by the FAA have to be re-certified, right? So in that level of high consequence training, knowing they got a 75% on the test isn’t good enough because again, like I said, maybe everyone’s missing the same 25%. The questions are bad.  And, I kind and without knowing, is everybody missing these eight questions or is everyone choosing C and the actual is B because the distractor is wrong? And so I, it’s so I’m That is a, very powerful element on top of the fact that yes, it’s just scor we know score. It’s been confusing from the score world of tracking individual or responses. There’s, It is not standardized, but we’ve standardized it and it’s, it works extremely well. So we get not only just bookmarking data completion status scoring, but then scoring down to the, if you check a box to track it, I can track it down. Or of course, avenue courses can track down to the individual response the individual response and just That’s awesome. Yeah. And just a page, just to how that works is, you build your course in course Avenue Studio when you hit the publish button, we have, this is really fascinating when you’re looking at the course from a course developer standpoint, if you click on the learning analytics tab, we will tell you up to the, basically within probably four hours, we summarize all the data. So you can literally click on a section, a lesson, an exam, a question, and get the individual learner responses, including survey questions. That’s a very powerful piece of the puzzle. And that’s how people that use Course Evan do to build the courses. It’s not just publish and forget it, it’s, it becomes, if you’re using that analytics, you get learning analytics as a part of the development process. So you can go and fix the question that everyone’s missing, republish it and see how, see what happens next.  Chris Badgett: Does that, mean that Course Avenue is a learning record store as well? So this, L-M-S-L-R-S, all these,  Joe Gorup: yeah.  Chris Badgett: 10 can API. It gets a little confusing, but is it  Joe Gorup: I guess if I put my 10 cat, 10 K or XAPI. In that respect, it’s an option when you’re using our product. And so we, we’ve literally had this before TinCan came out. And so I was at the conference when, at the TinCan announcement. I’m like, we’re already doing that. And yes, if people want that data, you check a couple boxes, enable this for this. Maybe I don’t want analytics, I want the final exam, whatever it is. And we will send back that data and we do store it in course Avenue Studio. Some people hate that idea. I just want just, I wanna publish it and get it outta your authoring platform. Hey, I got that. That’s fine. A lot of people are wanting to know the effectiveness, of their learning by measuring and seeing that level of detail. Chris Badgett: But on Gov education  Joe Gorup: Yep.  Chris Badgett: Does the SCORM file live on that website?  Joe Gorup: We have a storage mechanism within Course Avenue. So it, you, the courses are, does  Chris Badgett: it kinda I frame in or does it actually serve from your WordPress  Joe Gorup: site? It’s, it serves from our WordPress site.  Chris Badgett: Okay,  Joe Gorup: cool. So you’re in Lifter and you take, you click on Launch My Lesson and it just, a window appears. Yeah, and that’s our course. And it’s talking, it talks back to the WordPress site that. We have hosted and then it updates the score or lifter with the status  Chris Badgett: and talks back if they choose to. The course Avenue Analytics as well.  Joe Gorup: Yeah. Yeah, we do. And I, and part of that is for those that are skeptical of an AI created course, and I get that we have literally spent, like I said, we were very early on in the AI world before there was a chat, and so we have refined the process of creating education. And I was, one of the courses we have is on maritime education and I was really proud that people were taking the course and the feedback has been extremely positive and it’s one thing to build a course, and in our case, we don’t know, course Avenue was not a maritime cybersecurity expert, but we sell a course on it that was created by a course advisor. I’m like and, we knew it was good. We’ve done enough of, and enough QA know, like we think it’s, but to have an external third party who we’d never met before, right? Some company in Ohio bought the course and then bought 10 more copies for their folks and. So for us, from a validation standpoint, a director of cyber security for a company in this domain took our course, liked it so much that he bought 10 more copies. And for that we, our custom order, we actually manually sold them that. So we, did the manual enrollments in in lifter for 10 of those folks. But so that was another, I guess another feature was the fact that we could, API it people could make it self development and then. We put our, LMS management hat on, and we just use, we use the lifter manual enrollment, which worked great, and they’re all there and it’s in there my courses list. Yeah, so not only did we develop the course took, the maritime san course took about, I think four and a half minutes to create. It’s sold through our lifter L-M-S-L-M-S piece and it’s revenue positive.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to be clear course avenue.com is like your course creation, content creation business. Joe Gorup: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: And Gov education is an example where you’re using your own software to create profitable training, even though you’re not like a maritime No captain expert. Your process is able to create valuable training materials for an industry. Yeah. Which is really cool.  Joe Gorup: Yeah. What you mentioned the the subject matter expert ker. So like how do you extract this information and what we wanted to do with gov education, it’s a real thing, right? There is a problem with, there’s new HIPAA compliance laws federal man derivatives trading, new rules, regulations from the SEC, it’s  Chris Badgett: say 95, I just wanna say 95% of subject matter experts are not trained as educators, teachers, or coaches. So this is the huge problem. There’s a lot of great subject matter experts that maybe they make a technical document, like in this case, a legal  Joe Gorup: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Thing. But it’s a great problem to focus on and I’m so glad you’re doing that at Course Avenue.  Joe Gorup: Yep. Yeah. And yeah, but you hit the nail on the head. Course Avenue is the authoring tool, the product that we have that has course advisor built in and to quell the, or the, naysayers. We created Gov education because it’s like we’re gonna, we’re right, we’re gonna use our own tool. We’re gonna automate like the  Chris Badgett: hair club for men. You’re also a client, right? Joe Gorup: Yeah. Yeah. My, my hair’s a whole nother story, but but yes. But yeah, that we wanted to make it, is it scalable? Is it repeatable? And it could produce high quality. And we saw that for, we have basically every significant federal regulation since, 2024, is on government education. So we skipped some of the little the, Prune Festival celebration in in, Georgia. We’re not gonna build a course on that. But again derivatives training, maritime, cybersecurity, huge changes. Food stamp program, the SNAP program. I one, there’s 200. When they change, they’re actually changing the packaging rules for products at the USDA. And we have a course on it, but it’s buried the logic, the actual what is happening is buried in that document. So for anyone that’s listening, if you do have those, you’re the subject matter expert in whatever you’re, in. If you have some source material, as Chris mentioned, that transformation part. It’s not easy. You’re not trained in ISD. And so our thought is, hey, if we can augment that, take what you give us. We do the ISD, and then your job is to just correct if it’s wrong. So we have our, marketing phrases, AI powered, human refined, and that’s what we believe in. They aa might, they might get it wrong. You may want to t you’re gonna want to tweak things. You wanna put your own stamp on there, personalize it. And that’s, so you use course, so we generate it, it’s in course Avenue Studio, which is targeted towards non-tech. Gees. If you wanna get down and use the course Avenue API, you can do that. But we’re really about enabling subject matter experts to edit Main, and we’ve been doing that for a good long time. Mostly in the US government is helping people do just what we’re talking about. And now we see we can actually enable lots of people, with all the content we do have and or reaching out folks like you guys to help spread the word that, yeah, we wanna solve that problem.  Chris Badgett: Cool. Who, are like some of the clients, like what type of person is a really good fit for course, avenue or company or business or organization or whatever,  Joe Gorup: someone that wants to, to what? We’ve used the term measured communications. In other words, you have, like today, what we see is a lot of companies are struggling with the fact that I have again, standard operating procedures, rules, regulations a manual. And that transformation has taken so long using traditional methods with instructional systems, designers sitting down, it can be very expensive. And so if it, and then, so having people that, that have those problems, if they want to transform it into education, that would be a great. C prospect for us. Also it’s like folks that are currently today, they’re taking their p their, domain experience. Their domain, I’m sorry, their domain expertise. They’re putting it in a PowerPoint and posting it somewhere. Or I’ll put it in a, I’ll take my notes. They’re in A PDF or create a YouTube video. I did a demo. You did a demo of your product. It’s in YouTube. You may get some little analytics. You may. You may see how many views you had in A PDF. You post somewhere, it’s you may, you hope someone read it. But what about if I took your PDF and transformed it into an education piece that was now measurable?  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Oh,  Joe Gorup: I can now tell you how many minutes the person spent on it. I’ll generate questions based on your PDF and you, the person that wrote it, can see how they did. And then you know how long they spent on it. And did they get it? So as opposed to just throwing stuff out in the ether and like hoping, and I hope they get it, the education aspect and what course advisors can do is can transform that into something. Now you have a shared context. You’re, setting a learning objective and the things that don’t come natural to. Expert, right? A subject of expert is not gonna think in terms of learning design, but what that power that does is it, now makes it your communications from this linear PDF out or YouTube out in the ether to a measurable element that you can gauge and understand how people are they learning something, which is really what you want. So that’s the, kind of a big picture. The second picture as I think I mentioned. For people that are trying to sell content online, right? And again, we big fans of your product and lifter, we, I say big fans, there’s a thousand horses in there. It’s help helping people with that problem. Your domain experts, you’re not ISDs are you hiring people? You hire, you got the course out there, now you, oh, geez, you wanna make some changes, right? We’ve seen a lot of cases where a subject matter expert really knows tax accounting, really knows how to grow fruit trees in Arkansas. Like they just wanna, they wanna make some money on that. They hire someone to develop the course and then they, oh, how we make an update. There’s a, new frost thing we learned. They have to go back to the person they paid to create the course, all the content and that can time consuming and expensive. It can be really expensive in some cases. So all about pushing, enabling people to build and manage their own education without, and making it key is instructionally sound and available just quicker. A lot quicker. And then self maintainable. That’s we’re about. An  Chris Badgett: AI question for you. ISD instructional design curriculum design course content creation. It sounds easy, but it’s not, and  Joe Gorup: no.  Chris Badgett: And if a human steps up to an AI like ChatGPT, with my. Let’s say I wrote a nonfiction book on a topic and I plug it in and tell Chad, GBT to make me a course about this. That’s like a very junior way to do it. I’m sure what you’re doing, there’s there’s way more that goes into working with AI to actually create a valuable course. Like what’s an example that a non-instructional, a concept that a non-instructional designer would be helpful to just learn.  Joe Gorup: I, in our experience you see all the stuff online about ai either a, it’s gonna actually change the world. Everyone’s gonna lose their jobs. We’re gonna be doing as humans are gonna be doing nothing. On the other hand, epic failures, it deleted all the code and it, aired out and as a train wreck. And so what we’ve seen is you could, the chat gpt of the world from an end user perspective are deceivingly powerful. You can create an outline of a course. It gives you this positive feedback. You can, you could do some things, but how do you operate? The key is operationalizing that and to the essence of your question is, that how can I not just have it do something but actually manufacture and make it part and do this process because ISD is not a one stop, press the button and get something out. And so I, wish I had a great answer for people. Other than with my self-promotion hat on of use Course Advisor. But there’s that gap between I wanted to use chat to get some valuable information out and fully operationalize it as we have is huge. Again, and under our covers we’re, an education company, but under the covers we’re a software engineering company, so our techniques have been working on. Interface like we interface with you guys with, lifter, LMS, user API, we use the APIs of the LLMs to have a, it’s an extended conversation when it takes four or five minutes to create a course. In our world the conversation that’s going on, how much content do we have? What’s the essence of the content? How do you maintain context? When you’re going after building a given page of content versus in 155 page document. So there’s all these tools that unfortunately today they require programmatic conversations. And so I don’t have any handy tips for your listeners that say, oh, if you just do this prompt it’s not, it’s prompt engineering and software engineering combined with. Our 20 plus years of doing course development put into a big, we call it the factory. So our gov education is run by our AI factory, which is a very complicated piece of software. I give you one a quick example. It’s like you can’t be generic. So if I have 150 page document. How the structure of that’s gonna be different than a 10 page document. And so we have different models that we’ll use depending on, we analyze the, so we analyze the source material dynamically. Oh, this is this, I don’t want, I don’t want one section, in one lesson in 50 pages. I don’t want in my course, but I don’t want that the, but I don’t need 50 core, 50 sections, 50 lessons and isn’t going support so much. So what we do is we actually have this conversation with the content and ai, with our own knowledge to actually construct, to like literally hand build just really, quickly. Of course. And so, for example, that again, that differentiation of. What is the overall source material? Girth, for lack of a better term, and I just wanted to use the word girth, but and then that’ll affect the output of the course. And then there’s still another dimension of that, which, let me stop for a second if you have any other questions, but I wanna talk about the source material can provide a course, but that’s just the first leg of the journey, am I making sense about your AI question? Did I answer that?  Chris Badgett: You are making sense. I have a another question about accessibility. I’m not sure to drop that in here or not  Joe Gorup: Sure.  Chris Badgett: But okay. Yeah, keep going.  Joe Gorup: Okay. The okay. I’m trying to think of what I kinda lost my train of thought there when I, paused. Oh, the I know. But, so we talked about the course. So I upload my PDF and we’ll take, I’ll take a a, federal government example, look at watershed management and all the elements. There’s new regulations about what’s a watershed and how we’re gonna maintain it, and how you do these measurements. It’s a 95 page dense regulations headache inducing, written by extremely savvy. Subject matter experts, right? The team that built that, they’re half lawyers, they’re half geologists, and this thing will just it’s brutally hard to understand. We can build a course on that. We call it a baseline course. When we come in and the topic is the document. Educate me on what’s in this thing. Overall that’s valuable. ’cause I can’t sit through the 85 page document, but it’s again, it’s a baseline course and what we know, right? In good learning design, you’re targeting a topic, an audience to a certain depth of learning. And I think that’s one of the other things that we see with the people that use, that try to generate a course with Chet ut of why they fail so often is because they’re not factoring those other dimensions. So in my watershed example, I create a baseline course. I can give it to you, you can buy it from us, and hey, great, I now understand what’s in the document. In course advisor part of the, magic, if you will, is I can then press the button that says, run me a training matrix, build me a training matrix. We then look through the document and identify the main topics. It’s watershed surveys. It’s watershed soil recognition. It’s water it’s stream development and water flow diagramming. And then there’s compliance, and then there’s fines. And what happens if you do something wrong? So our training, our course advisor will run through the document, pick out the topics. For every given topic, we’ll identify reasonable target audiences. Is it an inspector, is it a landowner, is it a developer? So given topic, I have a set of audiences, and then this is really cool. Then it comes down to what level of detail and to put my learning geek hat on using Bloom’s taxonomy. Are we talking a level one, an awareness level or an application level? Course, and I can then check a box. I literally check I want, give me four watershed management, soil analysis composition elements. Give me an awareness level course for landowners, and then an application level course for inspectors. You press the button, have a grab a cup of coffee I’m not kidding. Come back and you’ll have the courses ready to be edited and reviewed. And, now then you edit them, tweak ’em, change ’em. And then just for those, not in the tech geeky world, like what does it mean by this taxonomy level and level of detail? What’s fascinating is when you look at a an awareness level course, you just wanna know Hey, yeah, there’s soil, there’s composition, and I need to type. There’s four different types. Got it. Now an application level. You just can’t know. There’s four. You have to know the four, and you have to know why it’s a 1, 2, 3, or four. And what’s what I, this gives me, this is fascinating to me. In our courses that we create, you can really tell by the assessment, by the questions that are generated. And it is fascinating to see that the questions for level one will be that are there, how many different types of soil compositions are there? Four. In the application level, it’ll give you a case study. In the case where soil composition is 87% manure with a hydro acidity level of 6.2, what is the most appropriate level or assignment for this next step? I’m like, wow. We can literally create that level of education that challenges people to understand. And you can’t, I, you can’t, you can guess. You may get it right. But I will the every course that we’ve seen that does that, it is a the, you just can’t really, you have to know it. Like I hydroxy level is the type two I it’s fascinating. So bigger picture, yes, it’s a course. But then the course matrix is what is extremely powerful. ’cause I can now target a, securities dealer in New York, or am I talking to the broker manager or am I talking to our SEC regulator all on that route document. So again, from a. Not everyone has federal documents, but everyone hopefully listening, you have some domain experience. You’re trying to educate somebody on something. So what? Do whatever you have of it’s like that transformation and I’ll call it like transformation plus. That’s transformation. Plus a matrix opportunity to target the learners as opposed to trying to create one giant course. For everybody. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a tough one. Yeah, so there’s that. And then you asked about accessibility. Should I talk about that for a  Chris Badgett: second? Yeah, go for it.  And I just wanna say for those that don’t know, accessibility is really important in online education. It could be somebody using a screen reader who had, who doesn’t have vision, or somebody who can’t hear if there’s audio content and all kinds of stuff. This is what accessibility is if you don’t know.  Joe Gorup: Yeah. And another, a good example is lapu. Some that don’t have hands. Simply use voice command software. We’ve seen people have disabilities where they literally will say the word keyboard tab.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Joe Gorup: And then they’re it’s not really a screen reader, it’s a voice recognition software will actually issue the tab. And so all that is essentially, it’s kinda like you can’t build a restaurant with having, without having a handicapped access bathroom. Yeah. Or yeah, go up the spiral staircase. In your wheelchair. Like you can’t do that in the online world. There’s WCAG is the foundation of accessibility rules, and there are a set of rules, like how do you make something bold and HTML there’s a rule for how you make something accessible. And HTML and those rule sets, it’s coming called WCAG which is part of WAI, which is part of W three C, the overall, so we’re talking foundational internet. Operations. It’s extremely difficult to achieve that. I’ll just tell you a lot of other tools out there will say, yes, you can build accessible e-learning with our product. Step one, become an accessibility expert. Here’s wca.com. Oh gosh, no, very few people can do that. And let alone know what this, so if step one is learn how to build your own wheelchair ramp oh gosh, that’s a tough road to hoe. So what course avenue is done? We’ve actually integrated in. The accessibility rules, section 5 0 8 and WCAG. Section 5 0 8 is within the government W. So if you’re a government supplier, you get to be quote section 5 0 8, which is basically just the rule. It’s the rule set for government. Outside of that, it’s WCAG. We build it into our product. So we’re like the only e-learning offering company that will say, if you build a course in our product, we will guarantee the output. The output will be five away compliant. And we have a built-in accessibility analysis tool that will actually run through and, tell you page by page, object by object, if it’s good or bad. I’ll give you one, one common example that most people can relate to, and most people are probably guilty of this too, right? You’re in Microsoft, I’ll give you a word example, but this applies to a course as well your honor. You’re writing a document. You have a, please remember the following, four key, ethical the following requirements, and you take the requirements sentence, please. Please review the following requirements. You highlight it, you make it bold, and you increase the font a couple notches. So most of your body text is 16. Now you have a 20 pitch font bold. It’s ah. And then you have your list, right? That’s a violation of five compliance. That’s a violation of accessibility right there. Why? Because visually that looks like a header. The person using the street mirror that’s blind doesn’t know that. It just says the following. Now they can infer it, right? They can infer like the, if you literally say the following, four things are important, colon. But there’s a zillion cases where they don’t know that, and then it gets really complicated because if you have these following in these three sections, and then the three sections has another subsection, visually you can see it looks like subheading, subheading. The person using the screen reader can’t, they can’t see it, so they rely on it being header tagged. In our product, if you, we actually have like fuzzy logic in there that says if we see a page and we see something bold with a colon after it. So all these little rules that we have, we’ll call it out as an implied header. Do you, are you really. Like ahead of us. It maybe not be, but it probably is. And then, by the way, here’s the fix, highlight it format. H three, make it a heading. Visually, you probably won’t even know a difference, but it’s literally the difference between making it accessible or inaccessible. Yeah. And so if you’re, working off of a grant with the federal government, the document you sign says is five W. It needs to be accessible. And I it, is literally part of just it’s federal law. Not many people do it well, and we do it well. And so I give talks on five away compliance and all that kind of stuff. So I, I can go on for a lot more, but I won’t. But if you’re concerned about that the people that can’t tab. Keyboard accessibility is so huge, especially we’re seeing more and more of that, of everything from, I had personal experience with returning veterans that can’t use a mouse. And if your course or your content says, welcome to our course, click here to begin. And you have to, you don’t recognize the keyboard. It’s just, not cool. It’s, doing a disservice. And as more content’s being pumped out. That divide that gap between people that need to get the content that just happen to have some kind of mobility issue. They can’t use a mouse. It’s not all about the people that just visually can’t see. That’s a big part of it. But again, the key is another thing that is, is big. It’s important ’cause you, it just, again, it’s the right thing to do. And I’m, proud of what Course Avenue has been able to do in that community to, to, and generate. To make it, so again, I call mere mortals, normal people can create something and then the output is five away compliant. And if it’s not, if there’s a question, we as a company will back, we’re there, we have your back. And I can say that because we do work in the government. We have literally millions of learners that have used our courses and there’s never been a, technology issue with a course having a course. So that’s all about accessibility for now,  Chris Badgett: working with government that you would have to meet the accessibility need or requirement. But that’s awesome that you’re so passionate about it anyways, that really every course creator, it’s like a cherry on top. Not only are you helping subject matter experts solve the experts curse. By turning volume of content into actual usable online course, but you’re also making it accessible to all types of people.  Joe Gorup: Yep. That’s  Chris Badgett: great.  Joe Gorup: Yeah, it is. The funny is we got, started in the whole federal government because of our promise, inaccessibility. ’cause that’s a, it is a really hard problem to solve and I’ll just. It bothers me when I see a sexy demo. So I authoring tool out there, look at all these cool flashing lights and bells and whistles and whirling fans. And then they’ll also say, you can make five way compliant software e-learning courses. And what they don’t tell you is the demo you just saw. Isn’t fine, isn’t accessible, it just looks really good. And then so I’ve seen people have that buyer’s remorse where it’s like they realize it, they did all these, things. And then they found out later that, oh yeah the questions aren’t really accessible or if you want to use that interaction type. The whirling fan interaction? That’s not really accessible. Oh that’s horrible. So interactions, of course, avenue Studio are accessible. Flip cards, accordions, drag and drop even. You build a drag and drop interaction in our product and we spend a lot of time, effort, energy to make sure that it’s available using keyboards. It’s a keyboard accessible. Oh, drag and drop element. So  Chris Badgett: that’s incredible. Yeah. That’s Joe Gora. He’s from Course Avenue. Go to course avenue.com. Also check out Gov Education, which is an implementation using Course Avenue’s technology called Course Advisor.  Joe Gorup: Yep.  Chris Badgett: And Joe, thank you for telling your story. Thank you for being a shining example of a innovator and technologist using lifter LMS, but also with a lot of. Strong values of helping subject matter experts and making the web accessible. It’s really admirable. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.  Joe Gorup: Oh, I appreciate it. Appreciate Chris. Thanks a appreciate. Speaker 2: 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post AI Empowered Course SCORM Content Creation With Joe Gorup From CourseAvenue appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this episode of LMScast, learning and development specialist Lee-Anne Ragan, who has over 40 years of experience working with international organizations, such as the United Nations, shares useful tips for designing more successful and captivating learning opportunities. According to her, many course designers fail because they don’t always understand how people learn best, not because they lack knowledge. In order to assist trainers in creating well-rounded learning programs, Lee-Anne presents her SAKE framework, which stands for Skills, Attitude, Knowledge, and Experience. While many courses place a lot of emphasis on knowledge such as theory, frameworks, and information, Lee-Anne highlights that students really appreciate experiencing the most, which means having the chance to put what they’ve learned into practice after the course. However, the component that online courses and training programs most commonly lack is experience. Additionally, Lee-Anne talks about “information overload,” or what she refers to as “infobesity,” which is a condition in which individuals are overloaded with information and have shorter attention spans. Because of this, course designers must make their material interesting, helpful, and instantly applicable in order to lower learning friction. She suggests planning instruction for both before and after the learning experience, in addition to what occurs during the course. For instance, teachers might use resources like her HARP technique (Highlights, Actions, Resources, and Pictures) to assist students capture important discoveries in advance. Through challenges, communities, or practical projects that promote ongoing practice, designers should assist students in putting their knowledge into practice after the course. The significance of establishing a psychologically secure learning environment is another important idea Lee-Anne emphasizes. She describes how the amygdala in the brain affects learning by assessing whether a student feels scared or comfortable. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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. Her name is Lee-Anne Ragan. She’s at rock paper scissors ink.com. I met Leanne at a conference in the UK for membership sites. It was awesome to connect and she has an interesting life, as well as interesting skills, tips, and knowledge to share about how to be. A better teacher, workshop leader, coach, communicator. But before we dive into it, first, welcome to the show, Leanne.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Thank you, Chris. I am so excited to be here. And just a big shout out to all your listeners and your viewers for being interested and showing up and times are challenging right now. And thank you for being here. We appreciate it.  Chris Badgett: Let’s share a little bit about your life. ’cause I find it so interesting, like some of the things you’ve done and places you’ve lived. Give us a little context. Into the leanne that we’re, listening to or watching today?  Lee-Anne Ragan: That’s a good question. I am a learning and development expert. I’ve been in that field for, gosh, 40 years or something like that. I hold a Canadian passport. I’m a proud Canadian, and I just spent the last 14 years living in Kenya in East Africa. And you might think to yourself, this does not look like a Kenyan background. It’s because I’ve just moved to France. So I am in Southern France adjusting to weather that is very different from Kenya. And I’ve just, I think I’ve been here a few months and I’ve just about finished the, when I see a little thing out of the corner of my eye, I’ve just about stopped thinking, oh, it must be a monkey. Not too many of those in Southern France. But I, I’m all about changing the way the world learns. I think that if we put more emphasis on learning, really good learning, that’s engaging and interesting and raises curiosity, that’s a game changer. I have taught more than 50,000 participants. I think it’s almost close to 55 now. In and from more than 150 countries. I’ve worked with all sorts of un teams and agencies all over the world, and I’m the founder of the Learning Development Roundtable and the Transformative Trainers Academy, and I’m also a huge fan of Chris’s. So super excited to be here. Chris Badgett: Funny when we met we were at a conference and just making introductions at a table. And then you recognized the podcast voice, which has never, rarely happens to me in person. So it was it was a lot of fun.  Lee-Anne Ragan: I just about got whiplash. I think I was looking down, taking some notes, and my head literally flew up. I’m like, I know that voice. I would recognize that voice anywhere.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s, fun. Yeah. That  Lee-Anne Ragan: was really fun.  Chris Badgett: It’s a small world in reality.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: We talk a lot on the show about the five hats you have to wear. One of ’em is to be an entrepreneur. One of ’em is to be a subject matter expert. One of ’em is to be a community builder. One of ’em is to be a technologist. And the final one where you really sit strong is to be a teacher or instructional designer or coach. And that’s often a weak point. Like somebody may be good at tech, good enough to put a website together, do some marketing. Start a business. They have their subject matter expertise. They’re super passionate, but they never went to teaching school, or they don’t necessarily have a lot of experience like running groups or learning environments. So dial us in. Take us in on some of the ways that any course creator or coach can get past the writer’s block or the fear of. Teaching and taking all this passion and subject matter expertise and actually creating an engaging learning environment.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah, I’m so glad you mentioned that, Chris. Those different hats. ’cause I think much like you, I think lifter talks about reducing the friction. And I think we put so much friction in place with learning. And I think you’re absolutely right. People are, I talk about being info busy. And Infobesity we are so busy, we are walking and talking faster than we did generations ago. And my youngest son is a filmmaker. And I did a little bit of research. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a film from decades ago, like the 1930s, but the average shot length, you’ll notice this right away if you haven’t seen one recently. The average shot length of the where they hold the scene is 500% shorter. 500% shorter. Like our attention spans are just like, I don’t you gotta grab ’em in five seconds or someone’s off to the new thing. And despite learning being one of the best predictors of personal income and country income, but despite all that. We don’t put a lot of emphasis on that. We want to know without going through the process of learning. And I’m sure you face that all the time with tech, right? People want to know, how do you use this tech thing? I just wanna understand it. And I remember a colleague, the most mild mannered professor, brilliant PhD, world renowned expert, super gentle, super soft, not a fan of tech. And she actually threw her computer down on the floor and broke it ’cause she was so frustrated with the tech. Yeah, I think this whole notion of really trying to bring acknowledging that your listeners and viewers have a lot on the go. We all do, but if we bring that learning a little bit more to the forefront and reduce that friction. I think we can have so many huge benefits. You’ve got coaches and trainers and game changers and change makers all in your in our community working together. And it just makes a huge difference. I, remember. Doing a workshop for the UN and Mogadishu in Somalia. We’re in a conflict zone. We are in a highly secure area, and I did a a conflict resolution workshop for, a team, a UN team, and I was in the. The restaurant eating dinner that, that night. And this woman comes flying at me and gives me this big hug and she’s just all exuberant. And she was Syrian actually, and she talked about using one of these really simple techniques from, the workshops, and she was able to really deescalate the conflict. It made a big dis it made a big difference. So just backing up there, I think. Placing an emphasis on learning. And I know folks have worked so hard to get to where they are with their subject matter expertise. So putting a lens on that learning can mean growing your audience, making a bigger impact, making a difference, building a bigger community all of those kinds of things. An example of not doing that. Is, I remember years and years ago I went to a coaching workshop and it was like like a sports coaching. And Chris, I know you run these incredibly long runs and you climb mountains and I’m as far away from that as you can get, right? I’m quite happy on the weekend to hunker down and read and I’ll go dancing, like whatever. So going to this coaching clinic, I was so nervous and anxious and it was a big stretch for me. And this happened I don’t know, maybe 30 years ago. I don’t remember anything from the workshop except for one thing, which is where the teacher told us that if he caught us, and there was, by the way, there’s a hundred, about a hundred people in the class. If he taught us, if he caught us rather with our hands in our pockets, he would point at us and we had to come down to the middle of the auditorium and do 10 pushups in front of everyone, like chris, all we can, all I could think of is wear my hands. Wear my hands. Don’t put your hands in pockets. Wear your hands. Wear your hands. Don’t put them, don’t wear, no, don’t just pay attention to your hands. Just focus on your hands. Don’t put them in your pockets right now. What does putting your hands in your s have to do with coaching? I don’t think there’s a good case for a connection there but it definitely left an impression in terms of I didn’t learn anything else except keep my hands on my out of the pockets. You asked about some tips and such for creating, really engaging, sticky learning. Years ago I was at I was doing a, workshop for U United Nations team and I was in Cairo and there were people from all over the world. It was like a five day workshop I was leading and. I remember it was supposed to be a competency based workshop, and I remember a couple of the participants coming to me saying, Leanne, if we don’t have this competency, does it mean that we’re incompetent? And Chris, I don’t know if you’ve had something in your world happen where someone asks you the best question and you end up thinking about it for a month after. That led me to designing this tool called, it’s an acronym called sake. So you can look at it for your sake as a course creator, as a coach, as a trainer, as a changemaker, a game changer. You can look at it for the sake of your participants, your community, you know the world, however you wish, and it’s where S stands for skills, right? So whatever your content is, what skills do you wanna teach? A stands for attitude. Chris, I don’t know if you can remember. And I know you’ve got two girls when they were little. When they were toddlers. Do you ever remember trying to get them dressed? One of them dressed when they did not want to get dressed? Can you remember doing that?  Chris Badgett: I can’t.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah it’s hard to tar toddler that does not wanna get dressed. So the A stands for attitude, which is mission, vision, and Values and Motivation, right? So how can we help our participants? And by the way, I’ll use different words. You might use clients, you might use contacts, you might use students whatever works in the world of the listeners. How can we help motivate them? How can we create some attitudinal like I wanna be here, right? It’s the difference between dressing a toddler that wants to get dressed and not. So S is skills, A is attitude, K is knowledge. So that’s all the information, the theory, the frameworks, the research, right? And then E stands for experience, and that’s how do we get the learners to experience your content. Outside of the course. So how do we get them to use it? Practice it when the course, when the workshop, when the seminar is over. So that’s my sake to, I have a survey I can share with your listeners. ’cause we all have biases, right? We love we, unconsciously, we teach how we like to learn. Which is great for the people who learn like we do, right? So you’ll probably have a bias. In the S, the A, the K and the E. And I’ve done this survey for years and years, and the thing that people are looking for the most, it never moves out of top place. So Chris, can you guess if, someone’s coming to a workshop, right? They’ve signed up for a course, right? They’ve, they’re going to a conference, they’re going to a. An online webinar, whatever. Maybe people listening now think which one do you think is the most important to people? Is it skills? I wanna learn how to do something? Is it attitude? I want to focus on my mission, my vision, my values, my motivation. Is it knowledge? I wanna learn theory and information and research? Or is it experience? I want to use what I’ve learned outside the classroom, whatever the classroom is. What do you think? Chris Badgett: It’s probably knowledge, and this goes into the maybe the infobesity thing you were mentioning. Ah,  Lee-Anne Ragan: okay. So  Chris Badgett: that would be my guess, but, or maybe it’s an experience. I’m not sure.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Ding ding,  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Lee-Anne Ragan: It’s actually experience.  Chris Badgett: Okay.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah. So pe, which is. Fantastic. I’ve, people have taken this survey from all over the world and it never comes out of top place. And if you think about that people have signed up, they’ve paid money, or if it’s free they’ve set aside the time ’cause they wanna learn from you. Chris, they like, they’re like, I am in this place where I wanna learn this thing and I want it to make a difference. That is like the angels are singing, the confetti is falling. The neon lights. Strobe lights are glowing. That’s fantastic. As opposed to, I just wanna do this thing. ’cause I just wanna check it off the list. Now, if experience I wanna use your content, right? It’s not just, I wanna learn how to use lifter LMS, I want to learn how to use these tools. I actually want to use them in my business. It’s not like a. Technical thing, or like a university big lecture thing. I wanna be very pragmatic if, that’s what most people are looking for. The E what do you think more, most course creators leave out of the four, the skills, attitude. Knowledge and experience, which is the thing that’s missing from most courses? Most webinars, most complex,  Chris Badgett: probably attitude.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Oh,  Chris Badgett: or skills.  Lee-Anne Ragan: I love that you, I love that you said attitude. When I chat with folks that I’m teaching. People tend to think, they either get the attitude piece of course we people, we need to have a vision. We need to hold that motivation. Or they’re like, my content has nothing to do with attitude, which I would pick to differ. Like different content. You’ll have different percentages in these things, but each one is really important. It’s actually, are you ready? It’s actually experience. Okay.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Lee-Anne Ragan: So the thing that people want the most,  Chris Badgett: they leave out, this  Lee-Anne Ragan: is the thing, this is what we’re leaving out. Yeah, this is what we’re missing. What most, and if you think about it, Chris, I don’t know, I don’t wanna put you on the spot, but if you can maybe think about a course that you took or a webinar or a workshop, did the instructor build in a way to help you apply that learning? Can you.  Chris Badgett: In most cases, no, but I’ve had the fortunate experience of having cases where that was there. Lee-Anne Ragan: Great. Great. And can you think of how they did that?  Chris Badgett: Yes. So two main ways. One was this was more of a coaching program that had a lot of course content and knowledge, but it also had three in-person events per year. So those are everybody coming together. Speaker 3: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Lee-Anne Ragan: Okay.  Chris Badgett: Which creates an experience. And then there was a lot of in a training there would be time set aside to actually this, creator had a concept called no homework. So when you came to the to the session, you would learn some information, there’d be some coaching, but there will also be time in that time boxed hour or two where. Everybody’s actually working on a worksheet or something to implement the ideas we just learned about. So it was all packaged together. Lee-Anne Ragan: Great. I’m super happy to hear that. And I’m gonna just gently push back a little bit ’cause the, e for experience happens. Outside of the course, so it’s when that person who’s leading the course is not there. It’s when you’re not meeting with people inside the cohort. It’s say, the workshop is Monday from nine till 11:00 AM What’s happening two weeks on a Friday? Yeah. Like how are they helping you when they’re not present? There’s no course happening there’s no cohort, there’s not, there’s nothing like that happening in real time. Have you had an experience of someone helping you?  Chris Badgett: I’ve definitely had community, yeah, the cohort community thing where I help people or somebody helps me. Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Whether that’s in a Facebook group or someplace like that.  Lee-Anne Ragan: That’s a great one. Yeah, that’s a great example of deliberate deliberate community, right? Where I can go and ask a question, I can support other people. That’s a great example. There are  Chris Badgett: one I just wanna add is I’ve participated in challenges, so like outside of the training. Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: We’re gonna do something like go live on social media for 30 days straight, just to get comfortable with it and start doing it, that kind of thing.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Exactly. That’s a great, that’s a great one as well. I like to call this kind of a three for one. Like how can we triple the impact that we’re having with our participants? Most people look at the engagement the actual course, the actual seminar, et cetera. But we also wanna look at what happens before that. And you and I talked before we. We started recording. One of the things I like to do is give participants a tool to help them capture their learning, right? In the show notes, there’ll be a link to a tool called a harp, which once you download it, it’s a PDF and it becomes editable. And you can look at your highlights, the actions you wanna take, resources. And then pictures. Pictures are great. It’s permission to doodle. ’cause our brains interpret images 60,000 times faster than text. So images are, fantastic. So that’s one tool to help people engage before your workshop. And then there’s lots of tools to help people engage after. Chris I’m gonna guess that you know the term Easter egg. Do you like. In the world of gaming, is that something that’s familiar for you?  Chris Badgett: I do not. The Easter egg.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Okay. And have you ever used it in learning? Have you ever put an Easter egg in a course?  Chris Badgett: No, but I have it myself.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah, that’s another great way to, to have people experience the learning after the workshop. And for folks who, aren’t familiar with Easter eggs, it’s where you hide something, right? You hide a little surprise in the content. So in the past, I’ve. I’ve directed people back to, for example, the PowerPoint deck and say, Hey, there’s a hidden watermark on slide 12, and slide 12 just happens to be the summary of the whole course. Like it’s a strategic slide that I’m guiding them to, or I’ll guide them to an emoji. And if they click on that emoji, they get an audio clip, it’s me summarizing the course. Or it’ll connect to a playlist, like a musical playlist where the first letter, now these. I can feel some of your listeners, like their blood pressure’s going up like, Leanne, do you know I don’t have that much time like you do. You pick the ones that work for you and your time, so you know, a little bit com more complicated one. I have playlists where the first letter of each song spells a message, right? Because when we raise the curiosity of our participants, it’s just people will work very, hard to satisfy that curiosity. Does that make sense?  Chris Badgett: That does make sense. Okay. That’s awesome. I do have a question for you around I think it’s pretty unique and awesome that you’ve had all this experience with the UN and working across cultures and countries. What’s something you think is the biggest takeaway of having had that experience that perhaps, you know, somebody who’s not working in that? Kind of intensity of a conflict region or having to do all this cross-cultural communication and change management. Let’s say they’re, teaching something like dog training and they’ve, never left their home country, but they’re just as passionate. What’s the, skill that comes from all that UN experience or a counterintuitive insight about communicating and creating change? Lee-Anne Ragan: Oh, I love that. That’s a great question. I’m gonna ask you to repeat the word amygdala when I count to three. And for folks that are listening, if you wanna do this as well, feel free. So on the count to three, please say the word amygdala. 1, 2, 3.  Chris Badgett: Amygdala.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Okay. You now know the Greek word for almond. So Chris, you’ve probably never been told this. I’m going to I’m pretty sure you’ve never been told this, but you are an amazing almond massager right now. What the heck am I talking about? You may know We have two amygdalas. Again, the Greeks named the part of our brains and they didn’t know what these things did, but they look like a almond. So they named them almond or amygdala, and. Our amygdalas are really, important in learning. They help decide, can I eat it? Meaning I’m calm, I’m safe, I’m okay. I can proceed to learning, or it’s going to eat me. Meaning maybe I’m embarrassed, I’m ashamed, I feel awkward, I feel left out. I don’t feel included. I’m exhausted, like any of those things. So no matter what the content is. No matter where you are in the world, massaging people’s amygdalas is super important because there won’t, it’s like that coach who told us that if he caught us with our hands, like I, I can still feel my blood pressure go poof. Like I’m anxious and nervous just talking about it. So that’s my amygdala. Completely flaring. By the way. When our amygdalas get upset, they grow to be the size of walnuts. They go from almonds to walnuts. So there’s no learning happening. So thinking about how do we help our participants to feel welcome, engage like they belong? Because putting ourselves in the learning seat, if you think about it, there is no other. Act that has such potential for vulnerability, for hope, for optimism, for growth for development, right? Because I’m coming to you saying, I don’t know this thing, and hey I’ve chosen you. I wanna learn from you. And that can be anything from your voice like you. So there’s three different kinds of communication skills. You’ve probably heard of the first two, which is verbal and nonverbal. But Chris, your para verbal skills are off the chart. Any guesses what para verbal is? Have you heard of para verbal? I have  Chris Badgett: no idea, but I’m excited to learn. Lee-Anne Ragan: It’s why I recognized your voice. Okay, so it’s the tone, the pacing, the volume. You may have noticed, like at some point I dropped my voice and I whispered for a while. If we weren’t on camera and I asked you to put your your fingers like right underneath your mouth. If you weren’t on camera you can’t see them. But it’s right there. It’s like our voice. Our voice is a, it’s right in front of us. It’s such a powerful tool for teaching. One tip I’d say, and by the way, this is built into PowerPoint. PowerPoint you may or may not know, has this incredible ai option where you bring up your deck and then you go to, I think it’s called Presenter coach. I can put this in the notes for people to access. And you have your 24 hour a day 24 hours a day, seven day a week, private personal speaking coach. It measures all kinds of things, including it it measures how often things like that, it measures your pace, right? It’s all at your fingertips. Yeah. So one thing I’d say is your voice, like in terms of massaging, amygdalas helping people feel comfortable and confident and able to learn your voice engaging beforehand. We can’t all do that. Sometimes people show up and we don’t know who’s, coming. But if you can try to engage folks ahead of time and then engaging them after simple, things like here’s a link, which I’m gonna do with all the resources that I talked about. As long as you remember this one link, everything’s there for you, right? It’s a sweet spot. It’s easy. It’s not gonna take a lot of time. Everything’s there in one place. Also. Knowing what kind of trainer you are I have a tool called Life Lenses, which is it’s like a personality assessment that I’ve trademarked and tens of thousands of people have used it. And it really looks at what comes onto your radar easily, naturally, and comfortably. And what do you miss? ’cause it’s we’re getting into awkward territory here. So Chris, let me know if this is something. That you would do and you would notice or you’d be like, that is not me. So true story. I’m doing a workshop. It’s in person. There’s maybe 200 people in the room. I do this workshop on life lenses, and I’m pointing out carrot life lenses. So carrots are very detail oriented. They, look down detail focus, focus, And at one point. This woman stood up. True story. She turned around. It was behind her. She was not looking at it. This was behind her, and there was a big banner in the conference hall that was missing a comma. It had a phrase on it and it was missing a comment. And she said she ran up to the banner and she took a felt and she put the comma on the banner and she said, that has been distracting me all day. So Chris, is that, does that speak to you? Do you like, oh, I so notice all the details. Are you like, no, that’s not me.  Chris Badgett: That’s not me. Okay,  Lee-Anne Ragan: so you’re probably the opposite of a carrot, which is a mountain. Mountains are big picture, look up visions strategy, right? On a bad day, carrots can get their head buried in the sand on a bad day. Can have their heads in the clouds. Oh, Chris, sorry. We’re supposed to meet Monday at two about kaka dunk. Ah, sorry, I thought it was Wednesday at eight. About, so I have a survey. People can look at what kind of trainer they are because the, life lenses that you identify as, those are your sweet spot. That’s where the sun shines. You are automatically going to do really well, and the people that have the same lenses. As you will love your workshops and in terms of massaging those amygdalas and not leaving people out, there’s some tips you can take. The Full Life Lenses assessment, it’s on my website, it’s free. You get a report that describes everything. So the key then is to look the lenses that you’re not. So Chris, if I was to take a workshop from you. I would expect to be like the vision, the big picture like, oh, the sun is shining. That is what you do so well, and maybe, you would. I need to focus a little bit also on details for the people who are carrot lenses and are like, okay, my head isn’t, there’s not as much oxygen up there. I need some more oxygen. I need some more details. Does that resonate? Does that land?  Chris Badgett: It totally lands, and you mentioned your website, which I just wanna say is rock paper scissors inc.com. We’ll also have a link in the show notes to all the resources that Leanne is mentioning. So that’s it. The LMS Cast website. This is amazing. Lean Ann, tell us what’s going on in the academy. It’s the Transformation Transformative Trainers Academy. What’d you create there? Who’s it for? What does it do?  Lee-Anne Ragan: Oh, thanks. Thanks for asking. So this has been a lifelong dream of mine and. It’s for game changers and change makers for coaches, facilitators, trainers who have some content that they are already getting out into the world, or they wanna start getting out into the world. You’ve got a, you’ve got a topic that you’re passionate about and you’ve got crisp behind you. You’ve got your tech stack. You or you’re working on it. You know where to go for that. This is a place, it’s a global community. It’s an online membership. Where people can come together to learn how to design. And deliver. ’cause those two things need to go to together, design and deliver workshops that wow. Like really engage and make a difference. There’s online resource portal that people get access to with 40 plus years of tools that I’ve created. And then we have a once a month live call that’s divided into a masterclass where I teach a workshop and then a learning lab, which is where the members can say, Hey. I’m doing this workshop and I’m really, I don’t know how to start. I know I’ve got my ending or I don’t know how to make it more inclusive, or I am stuck on a tech tool. So it’s a time to really live up and support our members based on a topic they’re talking about. Chris Badgett: So unique approach to pricing with that, which is very cool. It’s affordable. I’m always hesitant to mention exact price points ’cause it may change. But you set it up so that it’s approachable for anybody or groups and whatnot. It’s awesome.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Yeah. So it’s really important to me. I’ve worked in. Urban settlements slums. I’ve worked in C-suites and I think we cordon off ourselves into our little bubbles, and I think a lot of learning can happen between folks. So I really wanted to make it as accessible as possible. So there’s three pricing levels and if none of those work, I’m happy to chat with folks as well. But one is a a pretty. If you’re having issues. Beyond meeting your basic needs, that could be an option for you. Then there’s a mid range, and then there’s a range for folks who want to cover that, the cost, but also support other people. And we have people at all levels in the Transformative Trainers Academy. And people don’t know. They don’t know who’s who, so there’s no, and we like, oh, it’s just, yeah I’m just I feel so lucky to get to do that work because there’s. There’s a young climate, Ugandan climate change activist. There’s someone working with the World Bank, there’s a couple people who are university professors. There’s people have all these different subject matter expertise and it’s about getting their content out and helping them really craft it into an engaging piece of learning, whether that’s a workshop or a seminar, conference, whatever. Yeah. And we have a lot of fun.  Chris Badgett: That’s good. You are fun to hang out with. Lee-Anne Ragan: Ditto  Chris Badgett: itest to that. And there is an Easter egg on the about page on Leanne’s website. So see if you can find that. That’s at rock paper scissors inc.com. Check out the Transformative Trainers Academy. Leanne, if people want to connect with you outside of that or have questions, what’s the best way for anyone to get in touch with you? Lee-Anne Ragan: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m on LinkedIn, so LEE. There’s as many syllables and letters in my name as possible, so LEE dash a NNE, Reagan, R-A-G-A-N. Or they can email me. The resources will have my email on it, but my email is LA Regan, R-A-G-A-N, at RPS as in rock, paper Scissors, Inc. INC as in incorporated. Do ca.  Chris Badgett: Awesome Liam. Thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it and thank you for sharing your wisdom and getting everybody, myself included, excited about the opportunity to teach and lead in a better or more holistic way. ’cause there’s, that unlocks so much to really develop that skill and the way you help people do that with the Transformative Trainers Academy and all your content and everything you do is awesome. Leanne has been very generous. There are a bunch of free resources for you. Go to the LMS cast website, find the episode with Leanne Reagan and get those resources. And thank you, Leanne, for doing all that you do. And love that you’re called to help the change makers and the people that are changing the game, sending out those positive ripples out into. Their families, societies, and communities. That’s what it’s all about. So thank you so much. We really appreciate it.  Lee-Anne Ragan: Thank you, Chris. It’s just such an honor to get to do this work and I’m so grateful that I had snapped up that day at that conference. And I got to meet you in person and I really appreciate being here. And just a real hats off to all your listeners and your viewers your content matter. It really makes a difference. And I’m really grateful for all the, I know how much work goes into how much a, how much work went into learning all that and becoming an expert. Then all the tech stuff and now also the learning piece of it. So hats off to everyone and thinking about you all and celebrating you. Thank you. Chris Badgett: 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Transform Your Teaching With Lee-Anne Ragan appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett discusses how course designers may choose which e-learning materials should be paid for and which should be free in this episode. He emphasizes that while many producers are afraid to share too much information for free, free material is actually crucial for gaining a following, developing credibility, and creating authority. Introductory ideas, concepts, brief advice, blog entries, tutorials, webinars, podcasts, or mini-courses that assist individuals in learning about the subject and grasping its fundamentals are examples of free content. These tools serve as a marketing engine that attracts new students to the ecosystem and motivates them to continue participating. Conversely, sponsored material need to concentrate on providing learners with deeper results and actual transformation. This includes advanced lectures, certificates, coaching, community access, organized, step-by-step training programs, and effective templates or tools that enable students to accomplish a particular objective more quickly and with greater assistance. Chris offers a straightforward test: if the information primarily raises awareness or teaches an idea, it may be free; but, if it aids in a major shift or the implementation of an entire system, it should be paid for. In general, he advises course designers to reserve the organized systems and results-oriented training for their premium paid products and to provide more worthwhile free content to expand their audience. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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 LMS Cast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re gonna be doing a solo episode on how to decide which of your e-learning content to make free versus paid. There’s a whole free versus paid dilemma when you’re creating an online course or a membership site, a coaching program, an online education company. There’s this tension between what kind of free content or free products should I put out there versus premium content That’s only for my paying customers, students, or members. So there’s a fear of giving away too much for free. And, but it’s a super important one because it dramatically impacts your growth, your scale, your profitability, and your brand authority. Essentially free content, fuels paid success. So that’s the way to think about it. If I had to guess, and you’re out there listening or watching, most people don’t give away enough for free. But there are some that give away too much and just put it all out there and can never monetize. So both problems are bad, but the more common problem. Is people not giving away free stuff. They get a little too in their head about protecting their intellectual property, and a customer has to pay me money in order for me to help them at all kind of thing. That’s not the right mindset for growth and scale. So essentially the core principle is that you use free content to attract and then paid content to create the main transformation. Or benefit. So free is about discovery building trust, audience building, and paid is about deeper outcomes and implementation or implementation support. That’s more direct. So there’s like also like within the ping bucket of e-learning content. There’s things that can be very cheap, and then there are things that can be very expensive. So think about free content as creating awareness, low cost content, courses, memberships, coaching calls, whatever that create activation. But then the most expensive thing is actually what creates the transformation. So let’s. Talk about what makes really perfect free content. And to clarify what I mean by content on a learning management system, website is, could be a lot of things. It’s lessons, it’s courses, it’s quizzes, it’s assignments, it’s memberships or course bundles, but. Around all this. There’s also just the broader content that goes on your content management system website, powered by WordPress and hopefully Lifter LMS. So we’re also talking about blog content. We’re talking about YouTube channels, we’re talking about podcasts, social media pages on your site. All these things you can make a decision to make it free versus paid. So some perfect types of content for free would be things like intro introductory content or concepts frameworks, mindset industry education, some kind of quick win that you could put out there. And the benefits of giving out this kind of intro concept, like thin content. Is that it’s good for your SEO. It’s good for YouTube and Podcast Discovery. It’s authority. It’s authority building, and it also puts the first thing you need out there in order to build your email list. So examples in e-learning context of this kind of free content would be like free mini courses like the Lifter, LMS, official Quick Start course. You should definitely go check that out. You can do webinars, you can do tutorials, you can do blog posts, you can do podcast episodes. But let’s shift gears and so we talked about what should probably most likely be free. Let’s talk about what should almost always be paid. So paid content should focus on a structured outcome, so step-by-step implementation certification. Cohorts or any kind of community, any kind of advanced mastery and extremely powerful templates, tools, and frameworks. Definitely like one-on-one in depth or even group coaching access to the instructor or coach. So people pay for results, speed, accountability, and structure. So when you’re delivering content that includes those things, this is premium content that you have and should likely it should likely be paid content. And one way to test it is a transformation line test is, should I make this thing free or paid? Does it teach awareness or produce a transformation? If it’s learning something new, then it’s free. But if it’s becoming something new, then that’s should be paid content. Let’s also talk about the audience maturity factor. So different audiences need different free versus paid mixes. So if there’s, if your content is for beginners they’re gonna need a lot more free content. And they also just have more capacity usually, or shelf space to make space for your courses and videos and podcasts and things like that. But if you have a very mature or experienced learner. They’re gonna pay, they’re gonna be much more willing to pay faster for transformation that is quick and efficient. For example I’ve been in a software CEO coaching program before I went through a couple pieces of free content and then immediately signed up for a high ticket coaching program. The person who led that, it’s called Dan Martel. You may have seen him on YouTube. But of all the software CEOs in there, they were yeah, very willing to pay. And many of us had seen the free content, but we quickly went to the paid education offer because we’re experienced learners in our space. Speaker 3: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Just to throw like some warnings of like how not to give away too much for free. So teaching an entire course and putting all the videos on YouTube, if it is not a free mini course, and particularly if it’s has a high result or transformation value you don’t wanna put that on YouTube and then wonder why nobody buys. Cause you’ve already given away everything. One of the best ways to think about this more abstractly. Is a teaching framework. I learned from Evan Pagan back in the day, which is when you’re teaching something, you gotta appear, appeal to the different learning styles. And he calls them the why, what, how, and what if type of people. Content consumption, practices. So like, why learners? They really need to know why, like, why do I need to know this. What people, they’re like, show me the process. The how-to people are like, all right, show me step by step exactly what to do. Give me exercises, action items, and I will take those off. Then the what if people need to learn about the opportunity cost of not taking action. What if they do this? What if they don’t do this? And so on. But one of the ways to think about it is giving away the why and the what is fine. But when you start giving away the how, now you’re going into the premium territory. And I’m not saying never teach somebody for free how to do something. But once you get into, particularly in depth, high result value transformation and a how that should probably be paid content. Let’s talk about some practical examples for different niches in the course creator industry. If I was doing a fitness course, some free content I might make are workouts. Tips just general education about certain topics. But my full like transformation training program is, that’s a paid thing. So I would have some free workouts and tips and idea content out there, mini courses, but my main zero to your first marathon. Training course is a paid course. So if we were doing a marketing course, I might do some free content or free mini courses on certain strategies or just tips or hacks. But a complete marketing system, I’m gonna be charging for that. So that would the step-by-step paid market. Your business effectively training would be a paid offer, and if I was doing a language course. If you haven’t seen it yet, you definitely wanna check out the Marcus Carter interview on LMS cast. He’s a language teacher. Incredible story. But for free you might, as a language instructor, you might want to give away some vocabulary lessons and just quick conversation exchanges and translations and tips, but a structured fluency path to learn, a language to go from zero to I speak this language now that’s gonna be a paid offer. So just some course creator specific free content ideas. Don’t underestimate the power of a mini course. So it could even be a one lesson course or even a three lesson course. You can also do a challenge, which you can do, use the course structure in LMS and lifter LMS to create your challenge. If it’s a five day challenge, you have a five lesson course. Each lesson is like day one, day two, day three, and so on. You can also do webinars and some people use lifter LMS to deliver. Free and paid webinars. You can do free lessons. So Lifter LMS has a free lesson feature where you can mark one lesson as free in a paid course, and then the public can access that without buying. It’s actually really great marketing. You can also do email based courses. That’s another, way to just do a light version of your course to nurture somebody to becoming a paying customer. So a couple things to think about when doing free versus paid. Lifter LMS has all the infrastructure you’ll need to create a free to paid customer journey. We’ve got, you have free courses, free lessons, inside paid courses. You have lead magnet courses. Membership previews, you could do like a free membership level. You could do course bundles. You could do upsells and order bumps. You could bundle in templates and other files using the lift LMS membership functionality. So you can do all kinds of. Things with WordPress and lifter LMS to create whatever kind of free paid mix you’re going for. The key is creating the right mix for you and your audit audience. So my final advice for you as an education entrepreneur is to move the free line. Most people are not giving away enough for free. Particularly if you’re at the beginning and you’re just getting started and you don’t have an established like email list or authority brand on social media or YouTube or wherever start doing the free content. ’cause that’s going to. Over time compound into organic marketing for you. And there’s nothing more motivated, motivating than watching people engage with and love your free content. That’s very motivating and gives you direction on creating paid content. So give away as much free knowledge as you can. Move the free line to further than you’re comfortable with. Really focus on the transformation and the big results that you deliver. That’s what you’re selling. But use free content as your marketing engine and build a ladder of value. You can see this at LifterLMS, like we have a free core plugin, and then we have add-ons and various bundles that we can add after that. So give away more than you’re comfortable giving away, and move that free line and create a value ladder of paid and free, and use lifter LMS and your WordPress site to create, to house all of this great content. That’s it for this episode. We’ll catch you in the next one. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Decide Which eLearning Content Should Be Free vs Paid appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett and Alex Panagis delve deeply into the meaning of corporate culture and how it influences every aspect of a business in this episode of LMScast. They clarify that a company’s culture is its actual conduct rather than merely a collection of words on a “About” page. The founder’s character and principles are the foundation, but as the team expands, each member adds to it. Culture will develop whether or not you want for it to. The secret is to intentionally mold it with a distinct vision, goal, and guiding principles. Hires, firings, product choices, and even crisis management are filtered via LifterLMS principles, which include clear communication, extreme ownership, continuous improvement, reducing friction, community, and prioritizing student success. Chris compares what seems strange to those ideals in order to determine the mismatch. They also talk about recruiting people based on their character rather than their abilities. Character and value alignment cannot be taught, but skills can. In order to guarantee cultural fit, LifterLMS incorporates a probationary term into the recruiting process, allowing candidates to grow while being open about expectations. It’s never easy to let someone go, but when they consistently behave against the company’s basic beliefs, it becomes a vital move for both the organization and the individual, who could do better in a different setting. Alex adds that sometimes releasing someone is ultimately beneficial for them, helping them find a workplace that aligns more naturally with how they operate. Intentional communication and organized thought are two other key themes. Chris describes how LifterLMS meticulously defines and documents projects before creating them using the Shape Up technique, which was influenced by Basecamp’s developers, 37signals. Rather of making a haphazard decision to “build a feature,” they develop comprehensive proposals that include customer pain points, goals, risks, and strategies for implementation. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s been a while since he’s been on the show. We’ve got Alex Panus from Scale Math. You can find alex@scalemath.com scale. Math also works directly with Lifter LMS on growth initiatives. It’s been several months. It’s been awesome. Today we’re gonna dive into culture, IE, company, culture and mission, vision and values, how to shape culture, what you can’t shape, how it can work well, how it can’t work well, how to hire and fire against it and make your life easier. We’re gonna get into a lot of culture topics, but first, welcome to the show, Alex. Alex Panagis: Thank you. Great to be here.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, this a, this is a fun one to dive into. I have a background in anthropology. So for me, culture has always been interesting internationally and even within the United States where I live, there’s all kinds of cultures and subcultures and all kinds of things, but culture is alive and well in business and entrepreneurship as well. I think one of the wildest ideas with culture is you have it no matter what. It’s just, it’s gonna be there. It starts usually with kind of the personality of the founder, but particularly as a team grows every member in that business contributes to the culture in the same way that every person in a society or a nation contributes in their own way to the culture. So you can’t always control it, but it will always. Be there. Maybe let’s start just with a general question. When you look across like history or businesses you love, what’s a company you think that has great culture?  Alex Panagis: I think it’s hard to point to from the outside companies because I wouldn’t know what the culture is like on the inside. And if history has proven itself, I would say that typically what on the outside isn’t always a perfect reflection of how the company works on the inside. But I’d say Lyft, LMS is a pretty great example of a company that. I, think the it’s a cringey perhaps saying or phrase, but culture is what you do and nobody’s looking. And I think, like you say, with employees and the team as a whole, it’s essentially what would the team do if they were to use their best judgment in the absence of the founder? Because ultimately the more the company grows. The less the founder can be involved in everything. Yeah. In our work with Lifter, that’s an example. If, I’m away and something goes straight to you, can I trust my team to act as an extension of myself without stuff going to you? And. Me having to criticize after the fact, the way that they’ve done things. And I think that’s pretty, like for most types of companies and the work they do, it’s pretty difficult to build that level of trust. So a lot of them put off trying to do it which I think delays them from getting there. At the end of the day, instead of if they actually actively try to do it and build that culture higher for it deliberately, then I think they’d have a much easier time.  Chris Badgett: You mentioned an interesting thing where sometimes culture is different on the inside versus what’s presented on the outside in the marketing as an example. But I find the biggest compliment that I would ever get is if I go to a conference and I meet somebody and they’re like, oh, you seem like exactly the same guy that I met or I saw in content or whatever. Authenticity isn’t necessarily one of our company values, but it is part of our culture. And when you go to a great restaurant as an example where the staff are friendly, you can tell there’s a lot of love poured into the food, what’s happening inside that restaurant’s company culture, it just bleeds out and it becomes part of the experience. And when it’s authentic and not just an act that’s like great culture. I know, I think Apple is a great example of a company that, you know has, there’s mixed reviews on how good of a leader or how nice Steve Jobs was, but clearly Apple has a culture for the crazy ones, the creatives, the people that push the human race forward, as they would say in their marketing. But it’s true. There’ve been some great people that have worked at Apple and amazing innovations, done on amazing timelines, and obviously Steve Jobs played a big part in shaping the company culture at Apple, both intentionally and just by being himself warts and all. There were bad aspects of Steve. He could be mean demanding and all those things, and that doesn’t make a valid excuse to not be nice or whatever, but. Culture is complicated.  Alex Panagis: Yeah, I think, yeah, I de I definitely agree. I would not to run back what I said, but in the sense that obviously it can be inauthentic and come across in a certain way to, from the outside, but like Apple is a, good example in the sense that to us, the company culture that they had worked really well for them. I think if you try to take the Apple company culture in Steve Jobs era and apply it to. Pretty much any other company now, it probably wouldn’t be a good fit for that company. And I think that’s largely the, uniqueness of Apple as a company. But also if you were to look at scale Math Lifter and other companies in the audience, the, not just the fact that they’re obviously very different from the way Apple. Operates and what they do. I think there, there are some core values which almost every company can adopt, but like some of the principles, I think the way they would’ve done things on the inside wouldn’t apply in smaller, different organizations. The same as if we, for example, were to try to operate like a company that has 50 or a hundred people, it wouldn’t make sense to try to. Build the culture ahead of building the team to that point. So I think there’s like that’s an interesting thing where I’m curious what your take is on it. Like how much of culture, in your opinion, should be deliberately built and managed versus at the end of the day, the team grows, we do more work, and as a consequence of that, we shape the culture. And I’m, yeah I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to it, but I’m cur very curious how you approach that.  Chris Badgett: I think shaping company culture starts with really being honest with yourself and who you are as a founder or a leader in a company. And when you’re authentically in touch with what lights you up, how you like to work, the type of people you like to work with you culture is not something you install. It’s something that you discover and then shape. I would also add that. There’s a lot of negative cultures or culture aspects out there. If you think about a cult, which is a, culture, a subculture of sorts, you’re often gonna see a charismatic leader. You’re gonna see like a mission statement of what wrong we wanna right in the world, or what atrocity we want to go after. You’ll see indoctrination protocols happening when people join the cult and cults have a negative impact. But it’s the same thing that goes on inside of a company. If you’re doing onboarding, it’s not just this is how you do things. It’s also, this is how to think. This is how we approach problems. This is how we treat our customers. But the first step is to get honest with who you are as a founder. Whether you’re a course grader, a coach, running an agency. You think about what kind of clients do I wanna work with or students, what types of team members do I wanna work with and who are my best clients? And ask yourself why is that? Why was there, there’s often some kind of cultural resonance that happens there. But for any company, the place to start is to do the che, it’s known, it can be thought of as a cheesy exercise, but to do your mission, vision, and values. ’cause culture at the end of the day, comes down to values, applied to the mission you’re on to achieve the vision that this organization is set out to accomplish. So the values exercise, it’s not okay. Honesty, integrity, like these are you, those can be company values of yours, but if you really dig in to your uniqueness, let’s just assume those things are table stakes. ’cause you’re, you like honesty and integrity, but what really makes this business work and makes people love working with each other, love working with the customers and enjoy the work they do. So coming up with those values is a great exercise. And if you’re bigger than one person, that should be done with a team where, and I’ve done this before, where we all just like separately around the table, list out the 10 values we think that make up this company culture, and then we review what everybody said regardless of whether they’re senior or junior in the organization. And then we look for overlap. Oh, what’s really lining up here? Or, what’s not? Oh, that might just be a unique thing to this one member’s personality, which is cool, but that’s not necessarily a through line through this whole culture. So if you go to a, if you’re building a website for yourself or for your client, the about page is, they should always have your values on there. The homepage should always have your mission, vision. I ideally in the hero of the mission we’re on. Lifter LM S’S vision is to lift up others through education and our mission is to do that with as many. Engaging LMS platforms as we can with without while helping our users level up and figure out everything they need to do to achieve their vision. So your about page is something that should never be just brushed over and do a quick bio about the founder or the team member and their favorite sport and what kind of cats or dogs they have at home. Get, spend some time on the vision.  Alex Panagis: I completely agree. I’m also really curious. One of the other things that I’ve seen Lifter do really well internally, which more so than most other companies we’ve worked with is internal training. And I wonder how you built out like. Maybe ev every, a couple times a week or every other week at bare minimum everybody on the management team will update some developer documentation of how to do something internally or how, where to find this thing to deal with a certain pre-sales conversation. I think that’s something that probably for you feels after doing it for a while and working with people that do it. Feels like that’s actually quite natural and it’s should be the baseline of how every company works. But in reality, it’s quite far from the truth the, like element of, oh, we’ve now dealt with this specific situation of marking a license as a staging license or whatever it is, like a basic thing, which it might have been also in, in some cases. It might actually have been the fifth time that it happens. But eventually getting it documented. I’m curious if that was something that you specifically. Trained people on and reinforced all the time. Or if that was more so, a hiring decision. Like you can tell when people are happy to document their work. Chris Badgett: Internal training happens. All companies do it at the wrong time. IE too late. So if I were gonna start a new company. I would start building internal training on day one. To document processes and procedures. But when it comes to onboarding there is a moment where we go over the company values and whatnot. But the truth is, they would, that team member would not even be there if they hadn’t already been screened through the interview and hiring process for values alignment. So that’s already happened. But in terms of attention to detail all that really comes down to one of our company values, which is continuous improvement. And it really ties into three of our company values. One of them is continuous improvement, the other one is extreme ownership. So if you’re responsible for the documentation as an example. Really owning that and owning the quality of that is important. And then the other one, the biggest, probably the meta value of lifter LMS is remove friction. And I realized very early on in building software, particularly a complex platform level learning management system, software. There’s a lot of friction and there’s a lot of pain in the space. There’s all the pain around people trying to figure out which LMS to use. Maybe they’re new to WordPress. There’s all these add-ons and all these different use cases, and they’re trying to figure out how to put it all together. So I see a lifter, LMS mostly not as a software company, but as a friction removal company. And that’s one of our core values, remove friction. And whenever we’re working on new add-ons or improving what we already have, it’s always filtered through that lens of removing friction, which ties into another company value, which is. Student results first, which means none of this matters unless the end user who’s taking a course or in a membership on a lifter LMS powered site gets what they want. So we’re always trying to, we care about our customer and our users, but we actually care even more about their customers and users. ’cause if we don’t make that person happy, nobody wins. So when people come in to the company. Even though those values bleed through in our language, like we had a call earlier and we were talking about communication with partners and stuff. Clear communication is an important part. It’s an important value. And part of what we do at left LMS, whether that’s on a support ticket and a marketing message, a landing page, partner communication, social media. How we write project plans for each other and ourselves, that communication is everything. And in terms of the hiring and firing, it’s to me, it’s so easy. Since I’ve been doing this for a while, I’m not looking for a job. But if I was looking for a job, the first thing I would do is go to their about page and I would look for their mission, vision, and values. Then I would honestly ask myself, am I personally and professionally aligned with that mission, vision, and values? And if so, once I get into the application, I’m going the questions in lifter LMS job applications are, all just screening across our six core values. That’s how you get an interview. And then if we’re, let’s say we have two to three candidates for one position. All we’re trying to do is find out who is the most in alignment with our culture. And by the way, the people that work at Lifter LMS are very diverse from all over the world with different religions, backgrounds, time zones, all that stuff. It’s not about demographics, it’s more about psychographics, like how we think, how we. Work how we approach problem solving and things like that. That’s what we’re looking for alignment on. So it’s, more of like a internal culture of how we work and how we think than what we look like or where we live and that kind of thing. Alex Panagis: Yeah, I think so. Just to share from my perspective on core values as well. I’ve always thought of them and I, this was in our 2025 year in review post. The one we, I wrote for scale math, which is probably one of the more fun things I do every year is to reflect on everything and. We spoke about this before we started recording, but I think it’s also worth mentioning here is because we work with different companies, it’s quite the culture aspect of culture in building a company. I think I see it probably at a faster rate than a lot of companies do because we are affected by. Perhaps let’s say at any given time. Almost a dozen or so, different cultures of companies and the way the leaders decide to run them. Obviously in a, in the cases where we do our is a customer a good fit for us? Do we want to partner with a company in the first place? We tend to screen for mainly that like founder, fit. If I don’t have the fit with the founder, which I think in the lift RMS case is probably as close as it’s ever been, then it tends to be. The standpoint of not being the best start for a relationship doesn’t necessarily rule it out entirely. And I think there are ways to make working with people which have different cultures work when the need and the desire for that is there. But the way I always explain, and I like to think about it, I think AI has made the analogy a little bit easier. And I think this is, in my view, at least for the foreseeable future, predictions are probably not a good business to be in when it comes to ai. But I think decisions are one of the, final things that will remain is like that. If you, if we were to distill work down into like a, the as bare bones of a nutshell as we possibly can work is a fundamentally a series of decisions, trade-offs, bets and dealing with ambiguity and pressure. And I think when I meet somebody and I, interview them or I want to hire them, or we start working with them together on probation, the main thing that I’m evaluating for is how would they deal with. Making a good decision when making the good decision isn’t necessarily the easy choice. So if they’ve messed something up and they have to come clean about it, they have to communicate upfront, are they gonna be able to take the right decision? I think in a, in an ideal company where everything is super easy. And everything goes right. They never have to do that. But I think that’s why you like only challenge the core values when stuff becomes difficult because that’s when people will try to, circum will have the upside of not necessarily obeying a core value, let’s say communication or if you have one, which is like extreme ownership, people will do something wrong and an initiative won’t go the way that it does. So then their mindset is, I don’t want to be responsible for the way that this turned out. So they’ll deflect and they’ll put the responsibility on something else, for example. I think it can manifest in many different ways. So I think one of the other questions that I think is worth adding is in terms of. Do you think that there’s anything different or more difficult? And I know I think the answer is yes, but perhaps more what is vastly different? Because you’re building lifter LMS remotely as we are as well, fully remote. I think that it is a little bit more difficult to build culture when you’re fully remote. But to me it’s, been the natural way to do it. Are there any elements of not being able to meet your team in person? And I think you do meetups once a year if not more, so that might become more possible, but I’m curious if you have thoughts on that. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Building culture online is both harder and easier at the same time. It’s easier because you have, you can control the environment. Like we’re talking to each other through Streamy Yard. I can see a three feet window into your world as you can into mine. We’re not sitting in an office together. I have had the pleasure of meeting Alex several times in person over the years. But it’s easier because in an office environment you’re basically always on stage, which is good and bad because you can. In the online world, you can put your best fit forward through your three foot zoom window, and you can control the environment in a way that you can’t in person. But this comes back to authenticity. If you’re putting on an act, whether it’s online or in person, it’s exhausting. That doesn’t mean like sometimes a leader needs to step off the stage and just like collapse and rest ’cause they’re tired or they’ve been out front for a long time. But yeah. The best thing that could happen when you start blending offline and online is that when you do get together in person, it feels exactly the same, if not even better, because now you don’t have the three foot window. You have the 360 degree view in real time with each other, and you can break, bread together. But there’s a saying I love from, I don’t know, it comes from some anthropology thing. What people are looking for when it comes to culture is a sense of belonging, number one. But number two is a sense of quote, finding the others. So this, has happened to me many times where I’ve run with a lot of different groups of people, whether. The mountain climbing community, the long distance hiking community, the dog mushing community, the WordPress agency community, the WordPress product community, the course creator community, the affiliate community. When you find the others, it feels great. And this is the cool thing about online is that it connects everybody all over the world. It’s no surprise that. Lift our team is really spread out because we’re pretty niche and specialized in what we do and how we do it. But when you find the others, when you have that sense of belonging, what you’re actually feeling is culture fit. So I remember the first time I got out from behind my computer after building an agency and in the very early days of Lyft all mess. I went to my first WordPress conference, which was actually I didn’t know it at the time, but I jumped over the whole Word Camp thing and went straight to CaboPress. Where in Mexico, where some of the some of the great WordPress product companies of the time the founders were getting together and. I got there and I realized oh wow. There’s a bunch of men and women just like me who have the same weird entrepreneurial interests. And like we have, we share a language, we talk about things like working on client projects or terminology we use in software and marketing and things like that. And it feels oh my gosh. ’cause in my hometown. I’m just a regular guy who works from home who like there’s not a lot of digital entrepreneurs around where I live. So when I step into an environment, even if it’s just a pop-up moment in time, you feel that culture fit and it’s really refreshing. I think one of the biggest tragedies and it’s also a privilege when it goes the other way, is to actually love your job and like your work and the people you work with. I don’t know the exact statistic, but I would hazard a guess that somewhere around 95% of people hate or tolerate their job. Because they have to. And that’s unfortunate and there’s not like an easy fix to that. But one of the things I love about Lifter LMS is we’re in the business. Of helping people love their job. Like when they have this entrepreneurial project that’s successful, not only do they create income and impact in the world, but they get the creative freedom to be the person they really want to be and work with the people they wanna work with. That’s why it’s so important when you’re. When you have an agency or you’re a course creator or a coach, that your clients that you like, your clients, if you have this opportunity to design an entrepreneurial venture, do it with a culture that you like working with. It’s so important and, but obviously it’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Yes, we need safety and we need a roof over our head and we gotta make money. But always keeping your mind that aspirational goal of. Once you have the roof over your head and we’ve all done it, we’ve taken client projects that we, where we just did it for the money and it wasn’t a great culture fit, but we did what we have to do. But never forget the, goal of creating that kind of positive cultural re resonance.  Alex Panagis: I think that’s such a important point because I think at the end of the day, running a business is difficult enough as it is that if you make choices that deliberately go against making it an enjoyable experience it, you’re, it’s. Making it impossible because it’s already, I would say the, again, the stats, we don’t know the specific numbers. But the stats of companies that make it past the first year. Let alone the th second, third, and then fifth year are incredibly low. I think, again, a big part of that is it’s very difficult. It takes a lot outta the founder to run a company. And if you have the ability to make small decisions. Whether that’s in hiring a specific person because their personality is quite significantly more aligned with the way you think, and that means that you are excited to get on a meeting with them as opposed to looking at them as just a series of can they do more work necessarily? And yeah I, think that fundamentally wouldn’t that’s what the beautiful thing of, running your own company is that you get to choose that and you get to build it. But in, in a way, it’s also the curse because as you do it you’re doing it you’re learning it as you’re doing it. So if you fail to do it necessarily in, the very beginning. It often feels like you can’t fix it. And I’m actually super curious because you mentioned that you had some lessons about that when you, in the past I, made hiring decisions related that what you would have to go back on because they ultimately ended up somehow making it past all the steps of your screening process. Then still didn’t end up being a good fit long term. Or maybe they were I dunno what the case was. Were they a good fit for six months a year and then they just started slipping and they lost the like mindset that you need to have for lifter LMS. Chris Badgett: Yeah. So this is, I’ll give two examples here. One that would not related to hiring, but when you filter things through the company values, everything gets so much easier. Like last year we, LifterLMS had a security release that was important and we looked across the space and we saw that some companies with the same kind of release did not communicate it. And they just swept it under the rug. But like our value of clear communication is like we have to communicate it. We also have a value of community, and part of community is holding space and protecting your community. So we needed to roll this thing out in a way that we protect all our user sites, while also giving them time to update and communicating what was happening and encouraging people to update. And that whole decision of what do we do here? Should we say something? Should we not say something? It was so easy if you just filter it through the company values. The same is true when something’s not working out. If, I as a founder or CEO have like my intuition’s, like something’s up with this team member or this group we’re working with I’m not sure what it is, but I just have this feeling in my gut. What I’ll do is I’ll look to the company values and be like, which one of these is not being met? Are they not communicating well? Are they not really owning the work they do? Are they actually increasing friction and not removing it? Do they care about our customers and our end customers? Do they care about commu all the different kinds of community interactions we have? And I’ll always find it. So what? And also, we’re not ruthless. We’ll give people a chance to correct. And something might be like something simple if you’re working on a support ticket and the communication from the ticket in question is not great, we’ll just use that. It’s usually just a training opportunity, so it’s Hey, we value clear communication and removing friction. This is how we could improve this ticket. And that’s just part of training and onboarding. What you’ll see is most people will just improve. It’s like in a cult, it’s called indoctrination, right? But you’re doing the same thing in a company culture. You’re just reinforcing and indoctrinating the values. You can train the skills. But you can’t train the character. So we always hire the character, and yes. They need to have some skills for the role. We care way more about the culture fit, ’cause we know a lot of those other things can be improved. When it comes to working with people. You mentioned the term probation earlier, it was Seth Godin who said that the only way to hire people is to work with people. So for us, like the first 30 days or 90 days. Is it’s part of the interview process. There’s only so much you can suss out in an interview. You actually have to get to work with each other.  And I recommend that anytime you work with somebody or hire somebody or outsource something that you treat that first 30 days or test project or 90 days as it’s just part of the interview process. And ideally you’re upfront about that where. They know that they’re on probation using, your words. But we’re just making sure, not just for us, but also for them. That it’s gonna fit and our. We’re gonna work together in this culture. Culture doesn’t mean everybody has to be exactly the same. It’s more just there’s a base level of shared vision, mission, and values that just align and everything just gets. So much easier in that standpoint. And when it’s time to let somebody go, there are usually multiple instances of offering opportunities, pointing to values and areas to improve. Like in the corporate world, they call it a pip, a performance improvement plan. You don’t have to be that kind of lingo heavy with it, but like you can give somebody, always give somebody the benefit of the doubt to grow and evolve. All that. ’cause sometimes you may be inheriting a great team member who has all the raw materials, but they’ve been traumatized from three, five years of being in a toxic culture. But you can see the gym inside of them and they’re gonna need time to recalibrate, integrate with a team, absorb the values, relax a little bit, and move forward. So it’s not it’s not like a cult where you’re in or you’re out. It’s, something that happens over time and what’s really cool to see is as you get a little bigger, it’s not just the founder that is creating the culture the leadership, the people in more leadership positions start influencing it more. And it just evolves over time. But you do wanna keep your. Eye on it to make sure it doesn’t get away from you. Or if toxic elements start creeping in, somebody could just be having a bad day and that’s just a bad day. But if you get repeated violations of the company culture that you’re trying to hold space for firing or termination of an employee is actually, I wouldn’t say it’s easy, it’s my least favorite part of the job, but it will, it’s. It is much easier to do when you’re. You can just clearly point to the values and then actions that aren’t in alignment with the values, chances to course correct that weren’t done, and then it’s time to call it and let’s just put our best foot forward and move on from each other. 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Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Alex Panagis: And assuming in a company like Lifter, that’s always been done in a way where at the end of the day, it’s not like you’re doing it from one day to the other, from a week to the next. It’s, a matter of okay, we’re gonna give you opportunities. And there’s ongoing feedback and a culture of consistent feedback throughout. Every week. So it’s not like the person would ever be surprised that happens. I think it’s more so that Okay. You’ve been at that point. And the way I’ve always, I’ve been told when I started hiring we worked with a recruiter and we had people on probation and. I was struggling to say I guess un say I could still see them improving, but at that point you have to make a decision. And the way they put it, which I think is a great, how I think of it now, is in a way you’re doing them a favor because if they’re not willing and able and don’t enjoy working the way that you, the. Want them to work and the culture that we have as a company, then at the end of the day, they will find a better home. Oh. And obviously that’s assuming like a good job market. So that’s the difficult aspect of it. ’cause we, are obviously having the, like sympathy and the care and we still care about the people even if they weren’t a good fit. As I’m sure is the case with Lifter as well. It’s a diff that part of it I don’t think can be made easier. But the way I try to frame it in my mind is. At the end of the day, they’re not enjoying their work here. So given the fact that they’ve had chances and probably saw this coming I hope that they’ll leave here with lessons that they can use to find something that’s a better fit for them or also just generally improve like a lot of the time. I. They they, maybe don’t fit into our culture, but because they’ve worked with us for x number of years or months before they were let go, they then moved on to another company where because of the person they developed into over time with us, they became a great fit for that company. And the other the, new company, sometimes you, in a small world, you can even have a connection to the company that they move on to. I think there’s a funny aspect there. I want to talk I think one thing that you mentioned before is. Quite interesting is the diversity of culture, not necessarily in demographic, but that’s also part of it is in. In skillset and focus and the way that they, they do things, as I think you said, it mostly happens in leadership, but sometimes in individual hires as well, is somebody joins a company because in, in certain co certain situations where they’re hired because of the way they are different. They have a different way of looking at things. Maybe that is that they have. An obsessive amount of attention to detail and the people currently in the company don’t. And that’s can be quite difficult for the person joining if it’s like something that they have to work against. But again, in, in essence, that’s the value that they then bring to the team. Are there specific examples of that in Lifter that you could point to of we these are people that we brought on specifically for X, Y, Z, that they’re exceptional at these things and it’s a skillset that we don’t yet have. Or not a skillset a culture or characteristic of a subset of a skill set. Let’s put it that way.  Chris Badgett: I like to think of the Lord of the Rings to answer this question. So the the elf, the dwarf. The Strider guy, the hobbits, they’re all, they’re, they become a culture on a shared mission, vision with shared values, but they’re, they couldn’t be more different in their specialties and what they do and what, where they excel and where they don’t excel. So personality whether that’s something like big picture or attention to detail, extrovert or introvert. You can have all this variety of these things, but you’re still like in the same culture. And when you have that diversity it’s nothing bad can come from that only good. For example Kurt on the team is very, extroverted. That’s great. If I go to a conference, I talk to a lot of people. But I’m also an introvert and I get tired. Whereas Kurt will be jacked up on energy and cool, which party are we going to next? What are we doing? And so it’s great to have all that diversity and I’m, a big student of personality types. Personality is different from culture, but the most diversity you can get. Personality types or like Chris Lima’s work on the different types of motivation that people have. Those can all be very different while sharing a culture and a common vision mission. So yeah, that I love variety. Variety is awesome. It’s culture is more about the how and the why than the the what of our differences. And I, just wanna say like the one point and one final question, one of the most important things you can do as a leader, even if it’s just you by yourself as a course creator, is to lead by example. Like to embody your stuff. And if your culture and your values or in alignment with your true self, that’s not hard to do. You’ll get tired at the end of the day, but you just. Stand up for what you believe in and don’t get steamrolled. And people are watching, like maybe you’re just making marketing content on YouTube or social media, but you are on stage even if it’s you’re a bus, a solo, one person business. And that you are demonstrating culture. Culture is more demonstrated through your actions than what. You say, so actions speak louder than words, so if you, like lifter you mentioned has a value of extreme ownership. So I really try to, if I have something, I really try to own it. And people, it’s not I, don’t walk around saying I’m owning this. I just do as best of my ability. And if I fail or let something down, I’ll admit it. You know what, like I messed up here. And that’s also refreshing to a team to see that. Everybody is continuously improving, which is one of our values as well as fulfilling potential. So if I am not continuously improving and I’m not fulfilling my potential, and I’m open and honest about my struggles with that’s really empowering to the team. ’cause we all don’t have to be perfect, but we’re all still trying to move forward and grow into better people, more effective people, and all of that. The last thing I wanted to ask you is lift your LMS is almost 13 years old at this point, so I’ve been here a long time. I’m one of the co-founders and you can’t always see the culture from inside the bottle. It’s like when you travel to a distant land, you’re very aware of the different culture you’re in because it’s not your culture or you didn’t grow up in that culture. But I’m curious, like what are some of the things we’ve mentioned some of our company values, but what do you think are some of the things that are interesting about the lift, draw, mess, culture and working with the company? Alex Panagis: I think there, there’s a few core pillars. We touched on some of them, one of the ones we didn’t interestingly I thought it would’ve come up is shape up. I think the, process of working with the idea that you make certain bets on projects that you work on throughout the year and the ShapeUp principle for those who want to read more about it was originally pioneered by 37 signals. The people behind Basecamp and the way that Lift elements uses it is a variation of that approach. And I think that way of working where. You write up a pitch that essentially outlines a core project that you wanna work on in a given cycle. If it’s something that doesn’t just happen in everyday work, I think first of all, it makes you think about the types of things that you’re doing a lot more as an individual. Writing the pitch is a, ritual I would say where. As you do it, you shape how? Given the name of the pro like Shape up itself you shape how you’re gonna approach it, and then when you share that with other people, it gets buy-in. It also lets other people weigh in and I think that’s an aspect of it, which you don’t have a lot in a lot of companies, which is. Why is why some companies are quite painful to work with and why it can be painful to work in some companies is that the teams are very siloed off from each other, so you can’t really get involved in something else. It’s this is my thing, I own it. I don’t want anybody to have like their input because I know I’m right. And I think nobody at Lifter has that mindset, and I think that’s a really toxic mindset. And then I think the other thing is feedback. There’s. There’s a couple of ways to look at fe feedback. And then the last thing I’ll say is attention to detail on the feedback aspect. We, always have the way of you’re criticizing and critiquing the thing, not the person. So go all out and critique the thing, but you’re like, ultimately none of that is meant towards the person. I think Lifter does a really. Great job internally on lift, lifting each other up helping each other progress as people, as opposed to using something as an opportunity to put oh, why did we do this in this way? Ultimately, something has been done. It’s more about what happened, why did it happen, and how do we go from here as opposed to sitting on an idea or thinking like, oh, we shouldn’t have done this. We shouldn’t have done this. And a lot of companies do that and it makes, it becomes really toxic in my opinion. And then the last thing, which I just said I completely forgot now was feedback. And then the last thing. Do you remember? I don’t remember what I said.  Chris Badgett: Feedback, attention to detail. Was it attention to detail?  Alex Panagis: Yeah, attention to detail. Sorry. Sorry about that. Then attention to detail is the, last one, which I think is. It comes down from leadership when you can tell that people care about how things are done. The vulnerability is a good example, like a security release and how competitors approach it. We can like shrug off and think oh, that’s like a detail who we don’t really care how that happens and. I think more founders than we’d like to think are unfortunately, like that they would look at the way something is done and to say oh yeah, we can do it like that. And they treat decisions that are quite important as unimportant, and that’s painful as well because it basically, it means that even the things that are important happen without ceremony. And it’s not that oh, everything that the company does needs to be. Celebrated and at praise that every, step of the way. But if it isn’t, then eventually people stop caring in the company. And I think that then is how you build bad culture, which is ultimately how lift drill ms. I think I mean, I haven’t been involved for all eight years, but I think that’s a largely how I can imagine lift trail. L ms has avoided it for so long.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. I appreciate all that, and I just wanna highlight for you out there watching and listening, if you’re looking for a value, the one that. I would recommend from our list is clear communication. So Alex mentioned the shape up process we use in the early days of lifter LMS. As a founder, I might say to a technical partner let’s, build a continuing education add-on. There’s the project, right? That’s not clear communication. So what we do is, this happened in 2025, Hey, let’s build a continuing education add-on. I worked on probably a seven, eight page document using the shape up process of what that would look like. I interviewed both on Zoom and by email some of our users that were already using lifter LMS for continuing education for their LMS platforms to find out what the pain points were. As a team, we looked at the document and figured out technical things, we need to figure out gaps in our thinking. So that document becomes like a pretty clear communicating thing of not Hey, let’s just build this software. It’s goes into great detail of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re doing it, what the interface is gonna look like. It’s clear communication, embodied. And then once we get to the. Part where we start prioritizing projects in the shape Up process. And that one bubbled to the top. It’s really ready to roll and it’s gonna be. I already know it’s gonna be successful before we even build it. Which a lot of companies don’t know, they’re just guessing. But when you put your customer at the center of your business, not your product like we do at Lifter, the product market fit. I don’t wanna say it’s easy, but if you actually listen to your customers and care about their pains and observe the friction pattern match against that, where it’s happening repeatedly, it’s not a guess. It’s just a project that needs to be flushed out. Alex, I wanted to thank you for coming on this episode to talk about culture. I’m lucky to have scale math working with LifterLMS. As you’ve said before, like our cultures, our company cultures are naturally so similar. It’s really easy to work together and do big things, and that’s, the power of like alignment. Whether it’s with team members, your partner. Even your personal life your clients, other companies you work with, and vendors and things, when you feel that belonging and that you’re, you have similar or even almost the same culture, it’s really powerful and it makes life so much more fun and enjoyable and easy, and you can make hard decisions easier by just looking to your culture and your values and your mission and all of that. Thank you for coming on the show. If anybody wants to connect with scale math, what’s the best way to do that?  Alex Panagis: The best way would be to check out scale math.com, but I want to turn that around more importantly to say thank you. And likewise, it’s a real pleasure to work with you. And I can say on behalf of the, everybody on that works on the LifterLMS work that we do. It is a real pleasure to work with you and everyone on the team. And it’s always exciting when we work with a company where there’s elements of things and the way that they operate where we actually want to adopt them versus having to think, oh no, the way this company does it, we want to like, try to not fall into those habits as opposed to with, Lifter, which is what the case is actually like this is a company we’re really proud to work with yeah. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Alex.  Alex Panagis: Thank you. Speaker 2: 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Culture by Design: How We Use LifterLMS to Shape How We Work appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Kurt Von Ahnen discusses in this LMScast episode that continuing education (CE), which is one of the most reliable and scalable options in online learning, is basically corporate training provided in accordance with certification or licensing criteria. He draws attention to the fact that professionals in fields like healthcare, real estate, and technical professions need to renew their certificates on a regular basis, which generates steady income for CE providers. In addition to providing compelling features like credit tracking, expiration management, recertification, and group-based bulk sales, Kurt illustrates how utilizing WordPress with LifterLMS can significantly cut costs by citing actual cases of businesses overspending on enterprise LMS platforms for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He also highlights hybrid training, which combines online theory and in-person practical, as a way to save money and explains how seasoned professionals frequently choose CE entrepreneurship as a wise career move. Kurt argues that many agencies and course designers ignore continuing education as a lucrative, impact-driven, and recurring niche. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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 LMScasts. I’m Chris and I’m joined by a special guest, Kurt Von Onan. He’s back on the show, and today we’re gonna go over the world of continuing education, doing it in WordPress, and really get into the opportunity. Of continuing education and how to think about it, how to do better at it, whether you’re a continuing education provider or an agency who’s assisting a continuing education provider with delivering the product. But first, welcome to the show. Kurt  Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris. Yeah, it’s amazing, dude. I’m so glad to be back. It’s always fun to chat with you.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. And this is good stuff ’cause you have a lot of experience with continuing education clients at Manano, NOMAS and a lifter for over a decade. We know that the people that are the most successful with our product are in the continuing education niche. That doesn’t mean you can’t be successful if you’re a coach or course creator or a school. But based on what we know from our interviews and everything, the continuing education platforms that are successful are sometimes very successful financially and also in terms of the impact and reach they have. One of the first things I wanted to ask you you had a great insight on differentiating the difference between corporate training and continuing education. So I like, where you went with that, tell us how you see those things as being different, but very related.  Kurt Von Ahnen: So I, I think that’s interesting actually, Chris, because I don’t know that a lot of people would see things the way that I see things, but it’s because I’ve had the benefit of being I was the corporate training manager. I, I am the agency owner and I do. I’m a course creator so, I have the, view, the perspective of all three. And when you are making continuing education, you are basically a corporate trainer, but it’s under contract. And a lot of people just don’t make that connection. They don’t really, they think corporate training is this weird, sterile, like some other kind of platform, some other weird thing that they’re taking where it’s mandatory training or whatever. And then they think that continuing education is, some kind of other product. And then we think of course, creators as being like. This like soft cuddly I’m really committed to this is my passion and I wanna share knitting with you. There’s, like a lot of overlap between those things. And continuing education to me is corporate training. It’s just, it’s corporate training under contract. You’re doing it to, certify people for another realm of expertise somewhere.  Chris Badgett: And it’s also course creation, right?  Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, A lot of the services that we offer at Manana, NOMAS deal with not just course creation, but we think of course authorship or we think of instructional design or whatever the phrase is you wanna put on it. But a lot of times we deal with clients that have some kind of overarching, like large training content, and maybe it’s some kind of legacy content that they had before, but they need to figure out like, how do we take this legacy content? And how do we chop it into pieces so that it could be like micro learning that fits in the modern learning environment. And then when we take that large legacy content and we cut it down into those pieces and, we make that’s what becomes. For this conversation. That’s what becomes the continuing education, right? It’s okay, so we can take this giant course, we can block this down into three courses with micro learning lessons, and then the summation of those lessons become a course tracked, which become a certificate. And then they take that every year or every two years, and that becomes the recertification to stay within that industry. And it’s. Gosh, I just realized everything I said probably sounds like a foreign language to a lot of people watching or listening, but that’s like how continuing education works. It’s a major corporation or a major vertical in an industry is saying we require a certain amount of education and a certification for people to be qualified to do something, and then you have to create something online that says, yes, I have taught them. I validated their expertise and here’s their certificate, and then that certificate needs to be renewed every one year, two years, or three years based on whatever the continuing education requirement is. And lifter LMS with the new continuing education add-on, just it nails it. Perfect. Chris? Yeah,  Chris Badgett: and we just did an episode on validation, and this is one of those things like. I knew before we created continuing education specific software add-on for lifter LMS, that it was gonna be a home run. Because you know what, these people showed up 10 years ago. They were using lifter LMS to deliver continuing education. Through all our interactions, we knew what their pain points were. We knew how to better serve things like credit tracking. Expiring access and recertification, making sure the certificate was perfect for what people who take continuing education, like my father who worked in the in pharmacy, he had to take, he still maintains his pharmacy license even though he is retired and my entire life I’ve heard my dad say. I gotta go take a CE course and he would go to a hotel conference room and then they started doing some online. And then during COVID they did more online. And it’s just always, it’s a thing that’s been around forever, like so many license licenses, like nursing doctors, different healthcare positions. Real estate.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Banking, all this stuff.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Dentistry,  Chris Badgett: sure. Yeah. It keeps going. And it’s funny you mentioned dentistry because if somebody is just, I’ve always heard it in the online business space or really just entrepreneurship space is if you can get a dentist as a client, you can do really well. ’cause they financially you every time, I don’t know about you. Every time I go to the dentist, I’m shocked at the bill and the dentist is there’s a nice car outside and they’re, doing well. Basically what I’m saying is there is a lot of money in continuing education and it’s also a recurring problem. I say problem in the sense that just like my father, he had to re, he had to get 15 hours or credit hours, whatever, every single year for an entire career. And by the way, there’s a lot of pharmacists on planet Earth and that’s just one niche. The pharmacy continuing education need. Yeah.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. That drives me. I’m always struck on these talks that you and I have, how that comes to like personal experiences, but. Think about Dr. Obie that I’ve mentioned to you, right? She’s I think she’s skill, skills made easy.com or whatever. I, by the way, I am very good at doing sutures with, scorm, by the way. She has a SCORM related course. It’s continuing education. It’s all about every couple of years nurses in the field have to re-certify in how to properly suture a patient. And so her course is like how to properly suture a patient. And so we have this a SCORM related course that’s continuing education every couple of years people gotta dive back in, get re-certified. And the idea that the platform tracks. Expiration dates when they’re due again, sends ’em a notification that says you’ve gotta recertify and resells the course. Again, it just keeps that recurring income thing going from a business perspective, but it’s deeper than that. Like you didn’t create a course on suturing people and being in the medical field unless you were attracted to that in the first place, and that’s somewhat of a passion for you. So if you’re the course creator that went that direction, you now have a platform. That takes care of your passion and treats your people well, and keeps people on time, keeps ’em certified, keeps ’em working, keeps ’em employed and keeps ’em making their money. And that’s like such a cool thing.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And the other thing too is like in all these industries, whether it’s pharmacy or other healthcare or real estate. There’s technology and like everything is just changing, so there’s retaking things the way a lifeguard needs to have a CPR, the same CPR training every year and so on. But there’s also industries like I’m sure the pharmaceutical continuing education. A lot of it’s changed in the past 30 years, and there’s just a lot of new drugs and technology. Illness, understanding of illness and disease and things like that. It just, it’s a constantly evolving so, not only do they have to re-up every year, they have to stay current on their changing industry. So it’s a very sticky business that’s like essential.  Kurt Von Ahnen: I am a mountain bike coach with the NICA organization. So we, work with students between sixth grade, fifth grade, sorry, fifth grade this year, fifth grade and 12th grade on mountain biking. And that sounds oh, you’re a volunteer, you’re a volunteer mountain bike coach. That’s gotta be great. No, it’s a pain in the butt. I have to certify every year on if you’re not alone with the student, there’s always an adult present. You don’t touch kids in weird ways you like. And then once you get past all that, then it comes into this is how you ride a mountain bike. This is how you go over a rock. This is how you go over a route. And so you have to do this certification every year to be qualified to be able to volunteer. And work with these, kids. And just from the standpoint that sometimes when we talk about these e-learning projects, we talk about it from a revenue standpoint or from a money standpoint or from a career standpoint. And sometimes it really is just as simple as I just wanna volunteer and add value to people. But you have to be qualified to be able to put yourself in those spaces, and that’s what continuing education helps us do.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. What else makes ’em so sticky? Part of it is that it’s, not, in some ways it’s direct to consumer because, but it’s not really, ’cause a lot of times, like in your case, even though you may have to, it depends on whether the business or the individual has to pay for the CE or continuing education. Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: But there’s usually like a business or a licensing body or a corporation or something that requires this thing. So it’s very much a much more of a business-like version of e-learning. It’s very business heavy in terms of. Like the transaction, like I’m doing this to keep my job, but also to be the best I can do at my career, which is my, the work I do, it’s my career. Kurt Von Ahnen: See, that’s the weirdest thing about continuing education is as you create your continuing education courseware, you’re not really sure who your customer is. And I’m just throwing that out there, honestly. So for instance. When I want to be a mountain bike coach, I’m the mountain bike coach, I gotta do it, period. I just gotta do it right. If I am a mortgage broker and I want to keep my mortgage licensing active. Gotta, I’ve gotta pay to take those courses and be certified and do those things. If I want to be a real estate broker. If I wanna be a dentist, I’ve gotta pay for those things. But there’s the other side of the coin, and that is like the continuing education. That was like my other, my, my previous life when I was the, training manager for Ducati and Suzuki. When I worked for Ducati and. Likewise, when I worked for Suzuki those companies paid for the training for all of the technicians to be able to, update their licenses, right? So to be able to say, yeah, I’m fully qualified to work on this year, make, and model of motorcycle so that I can do warranty work in, these areas. And so when you get into the continuing education. Vertical of e-learning. You have to understand who is your customer, who’s actually gonna pay you and how do you approach those people, which Chris, I’m gonna make it sound like a commercial, but I can’t help myself. Lifter LMS has continuing education. But it also has the groups feature. And so if you can combine continuing education and groups, now you’re not just selling to individuals, you can sell to those groups. And then the people that manage those groups externally of the LMS, like so. say somebody at Ducati wants to do training for 2,500 technicians, they can buy 2,500 seats of training. They can buy a group. Invite the 2,500 students continuing education and manage all of it through a page on the front of lifter LMS. I don’t know of another LMS that lets me do that out of the box without custom development. And that’s just me, like me being like totally both feet in with the lifter LMS thing. I know I’m biased, but that’s you guys are knocking it outta the park. It’s great.  Chris Badgett: I appreciate that and I just wanna say like sometimes. Because Lifter, LMS is built on WordPress in continuing education markets. It seems too good to be true from a price point because it’s relatively cheaper than some other software as a service that’s super expensive with these enterprise contracts and all these things, it’s like how is that? How is that possible with at lifter LMS price points to get all that and much more customizability and everything. I realize that it’s because a lot of the costs are not embedded in the product. So what I mean by that is because WordPress is open source software with a whole ecosystem, just the WordPress core software that has been built as a open source project. Now, there are people that are paid to work on that from different organizations to kind of sponsor. The, common core software that we all use and build on top of. But if WordPress Core was a private company, it would be hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build what has become the WordPress core. But because it, the foundation is that open source software with a huge ecosystem of community contribution, some paid some unpaid. That’s part of the reason why the price is so approachable to what some continuing education providers see as a sticker shock. Not the bad kind, but the low kind. It seems too good to be true, but this is it. It just takes an understanding of the WordPress open source community project and then what things like lifter LMS does on top of that. It’s, affordable, but. Don’t mistake that price for being a lack of effort and skill and contribution put into the underlying software.  Kurt Von Ahnen: I feel like you are goading me. Okay. I feel like you’re dragging. I’m into the conversation. Chris,  Chris Badgett: I’m not goading you.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Let’s just have it out, right? So the people that are listeners and viewers that are watching LMS cast, now, I’m just gonna say it, when I was the corporate trainer at Ducati, at Suzuki, I did work with BRP, with Triumph, with we’re talking about big companies. I’m in charge of their budgets. I’m literally the guy that has to write the purchase order to buy whatever the next year’s maintenance and hosting is for the e-learning package. And. This is why I came to lifter LMS in what, 2014 15 when I was watching our company spend $400,000 on hosting and maintenance for e-learning, but still ran a department of six people to manage the e-learning. That didn’t make any sense to me because think this through, right? If you have six people on salary, even if they’re a hundred grand a year, that’s $600,000. So that’s 600 grand a year just for salaries to manage the content of the learning, and then 400 grand a year that we’re spending on. Maintenance and hosting, and that was for these like weird, like SCORM specific custom learning platforms. And for a lot of companies, especially in the continuing education space, this seems to be true where, they’re paying anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 a year for hosting and maintenance. They’re still responsible for all of the content. Chris, part of why I got so excited and why I relaunched Ana Nomas the way I did when I left Suzuki is because I looked at that and I said, those numbers, the math ain’t mathen. The math ain’t mathen. If I can have really good hosting. Even if I pay $3,000 a year for hosting for a company with 2,500 students let’s go crazy. Let’s just say I need the best hosting I can possibly get. I’m gonna pay three grand a year for the hosting lifter. LMS is 1500 bucks a year. I’m at 4,500 bucks. I’m nowhere near $400,000,  Chris Badgett: right?  Kurt Von Ahnen: And so, that is where my head went. And then as I began to, relaunch m and Omas and help people transfer their SCORM content to WordPress and use lifter LMS and do things in different ways. And I realized that this call might be going a different direction than what we originally said. To me, it was a whole, for an agency perspective, it was a whole other market to look at. And the weirdest part is when you talk to people and you say, Hey, you’re currently paying $300,000 a year for your e-learning platform. I can do it for 60 grand a year. It sounds like for people in the WordPress space, 60 grand a year seems like a lot of money, but for people in the e-learning space. 60 grand a year sounds like it’s too good to be true. It prob it can’t possibly be good and what we’re actually delivering is. A learning management system surrounded by a content management system that gives us a premium student experience and gives us the ability to add features to our LMS that corporations haven’t had in years. And it’s the same with continuing education, a lot of continuing education. People are still locked into finding a platform that will run scorm. Which means they’re learning at Learn upon Bridge Blackboard, things like that. And so they’re looking at these other platforms instead of realizing, Hey, I could move this over to WordPress, surround it with a complete CMS, put marketing information and blogs around it. Add community features for learners if that’s what my client needs, and I can give them a much better experience for, I don’t know, 40%. 35% of what their initial budget was.  Chris Badgett: Yeah,  The Secret World Of Continuing Education Entrepreneurship: it’s,  Kurt Von Ahnen: I went crazy. I’m sorry.  Chris Badgett: No, that’s good. It’s, mind blowing. I appreciate the way you frame that in. I want to talk a little bit about like the who, like the, who is involved in continuing education. One of the thing I’ve noticed in lifter LMS community is that I’ve seen this pattern enough times that I see it as a pattern. Sometimes people work in a job that require continuing education and maybe they ultimately have that moment where they realize they want to become an entrepreneur, they wanna do their own thing, and they’re probably far along in their career, they’ve mentored a lot of people in their, job and they maybe they think that the continuing education that they’re getting. That they have to take, they’re not that happy with it. And they have this idea like, you know what? I think I could do a better job or, do a good job and make continuing education for my industry. Which by the way, I really understand because I’ve been doing it for 20 years or whatever, and I’ve watched so many entrepreneurs pivot from employee to continuing education provider, and they get going with WordPress and Lifter LMS. Then the funny other pattern that I see a lot of them say is something like, geez, I’m I’m not great at marketing, but this business is so successful and I’m just, I’m not even, I don’t even, I’m not even good at sales, or I’m barely even selling, or I do something like. When it’s time in a certain niche to get your ce, you got, you go to your, like your licensing board and they have approved providers and you have a menu of, companies that you can source your continuing education from that are like approved. Like I know someone who did something where they their entire marketing strategy was, they went to the board. The board was like, oh, that’s awesome. We need some new fresh content in the space. Can I get access to see what you got? The content gets reviewed and they’re like, this is great. We’re gonna add you to the list. And that is the entire marketing strategy. And it works in building huge, these entrepreneurs like X employee entrepreneurs or maybe they’re transitioning out of their active role. I’ve watched them become CE providers and it’s, fascinating. Speaker 3: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.  Kurt Von Ahnen: I, people are gonna get mad, but that, that to me is like the who not what you know, situation. There’s a lot of who you knows that really find great success in the e-learning space because to your point. They’ve become experts in the field. They’re tired. So I come from a technical background working on cars, working on motorcycles, working on diesel trucks, airplanes. I have an aviation background. And so what happens is a lot of these people, their backs hurt. They’re just tired. Their bodies are tired and, but. Through 20 years or 30 years of working in an industry they, that  The Secret World Of Continuing Education Entrepreneurship: they  Chris Badgett: care about.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. That they  Chris Badgett: love. Yeah.  Kurt Von Ahnen: That they care about, that they love they, end up knowing the fixed operations director of X, Y, and Z. Right? And they go, you know what I really think I could just create a course about this and teach people how to do what I do without me having to do it all the time. And it’s a really good exit strategy for some people to get out of the whole idea of. In the power sports field, the best mechanic in the shop, the absolute, the the most knowledgeable, wonderful, most awesome mechanic in the, repair center is probably the worst person. To be the service writer and the service manager in the service department. It just doesn’t work because you’re taking someone from the physical hands-on portion of it and you’re trying to squeeze them into a relationship position with customers and a lot of times that doesn’t work. But if that person with a high tech background says, you know what? I could make technical training that shows other technicians how to do what I’ve done for the last 20 years and shortcut the, pains and, the mistakes that I’ve made. If I could take the 20 years of mistakes out and just give them the highlights, I could help them fast forward their own progression through the space. Those are the people that seem to, that come up with really good courses that seem to be able to sell things really well to people at the higher levels.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, and a funny thing happens when you make the pivot from employee to entrepreneur is you wake up one day and you realize, oh my gosh, now I’m just as busy and I’m just as overworked and stuff. But then there’s something else interesting I’ve seen with these continuing education providers is they will start. Partnering or paying a subject matter expert to come in, they’ve figured out like lifter, LMS and like how to actually do it. They will license content to include in their courses. Maybe not the whole course, but like we need this piece or this template to show people and so they start building team around the project whether, and that could just be outsourced content or whatever. I see some of them. There’s also a huge opportunity with continuing education is a slow moving industry that takes a while to catch up. So it took the COVID pandemic to cause or to basically force the CEU. You can’t just stop, like you gotta get your hours. So it forced it to go more online, which was a part of. LMS and other continuing education industry tool growth because of ’cause of COVID. But the transition from continuing education being delivered in hotel conference rooms or in business parks or corporate offices and things to online is still very much unfolding if you’re very tech forward. You may think it’s all already been done. Everybody’s online. No, they’re still going to these conference rooms. So sometimes all you have to do, and this is, part of my story with Lifter and starting in the organic gardening. My whole strategy with the permaculture thing that I did back in 2012 or whatever, was to actually go to this education thing. This wasn’t actual continuing education. It was more classic course creator world. I would show up with my video camera. I would take the offline world, bring it online, make it available to the whole world through the internet. So there’s lots of great educators who operate in the continuing education world that have no interest in starting their own continuing education company, but would be glad to contribute to somebody else’s continuing education platform, ideally getting paid either a one-time fee or a royalty. Or something like that, so you don’t have to do it alone. And I also notice a lot of times this is a classic setup, not just in continuing education, but all the e-learning niches. I’ve seen this so many times. There’s a partner, like a husband, wife or whatever, and one of ’em is a tech person and one of ’em is a subject matter expert. So they’ll work together. Like I, I’m thinking of one continuing education platform where the wife. Is the subject matter expert has all those connections you’re talking about, knows all the speakers used to organize the conferences also worked in the field of that industry, but the husband is like the tech person and they bring it all together so that as a husband and wife, they start this continuing education company and one person isn’t trying to do it all. You can pull it off. I’ve seen it done where you can have a one person continuing education business. More than, more likely than not, there’s a couple players involved. Somebody to manage the tech, the subject matter experts, business strategy and so on, and or like they can do all that except for the tech and they work with an agency to bring it all together for em. They’ve already decided on the value of WordPress and lifter LMS and this continuing education features and certification and all that. So if you’re excited about this, you don’t necessarily have to do it all alone. I just wanna put that out there.  Kurt Von Ahnen: You as, you were talking, Chris it, really took me back to my experience 2013, 1415 with Ducati. And when I originally went to Ducati, they had a, contractor based training system, meaning everything was external. So if you were a Ducati dealership and you wanted to train your technicians, you had to send your technicians to whatever city. The, training was in, and so there was training for people to go to, and they would go to a live training. It was typically two weeks long and it was theory and practicum. It was, theory and workshop oriented stuff. And then when I got the job with Ducati, my job was to, how do we bring this, all this contract training? How do we bring this into an in-house platform? That makes sense, right? And so this is an example of what continuing education could be for somebody to just let you know the benefits to the main company and to the people getting the training. What we did was we took all of the theory, all of the theory from the classroom, and we put it into an online platform. That online platform was people could learn at their own pace. It was DYI, baby, it was you do, you go in, you take, you train at your own pace. That’s fine. Then you test and you quiz, and we make sure you know what you’re talking about before you come to the, in-person practicum. So for a lot of continuing education platforms, hybrid training is the thing. So there’s gonna be something online and something in person. So what I want people to realize is the old system had people traveling for two weeks at a time. So that’s hotel rental, car per diem meals, the whole thing, right? And then, so we took the training and we said, let’s put all of the theory online. And then we said, let’s do a practicum course in person, where we just really highlight the features from the online training. And then we take people into a workshop and we put tools in their hands and we say, okay, show us what you learned. Like shim, this crank set set the gap on these intake valves. Set the gap on these exhaust valves. Set, like there was all these things and we said, you have to do all these things. They would do all these things and then we would take a final test and they would pass. Now for corporations that are listening and, viewing this podcast, what that amounted to was we cut the training budget in half. Half, and then we certified twice as many technicians in that year. So we went from a model that was twice as expensive and certified half as many people to a system that was half as expensive and certified twice as many people. And that was from using online tools. And now think of that moving forward. So if you think about it moving forward from a recertification standpoint. They’ve already been in person to certify, like they know how a torque wrench works, and they know how Dandle works. They know how these feeler gauges work. You don’t have to bring ’em back for the impractical personal thing. Now you just have to refresh them electronically so all that expense is gone. All the per diem, all the travel, all the nonsense is off the spreadsheet and all you’re worried about is paying for the online platform and the cost to make the content. And in Ducati’s case, it ended up being a huge win. Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point that a lot of continuing education is not 100% online, but that doesn’t mean none of it is.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah  Chris Badgett: Just, like in my father’s case with pharmacy, even still, like there’s a certain percentage or number of hours per year that have to be in person, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean the online version. Won’t work. And I also want to just mention like in a past episode we talked about validation and sometimes you need to pivot on the who you’re selling to. So for example, if you work in the legal field or the real estate field. And you’re trying to like here’s a, real estate example. Let’s say you’re trying to sell a course to real estate agents and it’s doing okay, but not doing great. If you pivoted to wait a second, let me look at the National Association of Realtors, or my state chapter of that. ’cause real estate agents have continuing education requirements. I’m gonna take the same knowledge I have. I might package it a little differently for the CE market instead of direct to agent like, and I’ll go through the need in the existing river of demand that recurs every year to keep a real estate license. That one pivot can make a dramatic impact. So if you’re a course creator, I would, no matter what the niche is. I would just ask yourself the question, is there value in what I teach to some kind of continuing education market that is out there hungry for training on repeat every year?  Kurt Von Ahnen: You your phrase of what you know, what’s more efficient, one-to-one sales or one to many sales. Every every time you say that it, shortcuts the whole thing about continuing education, it’s do I wanna sell one to one or do I wanna sell one to many? Do I want to talk to a person and sell ’em one course, or do I want to talk to a person and sell ’em 50 examples of that course.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kurt Von Ahnen: And that to me is okay, I’m seeing it. Like I’m starting to, I, like I start, I’m starting to get it. So now how do I leverage that? Then it just becomes a thing. Chris Badgett: Then there, there’s also another exponential multiplier here, which is a lot of this continuing education stuff. You, if you think really big, like I may work at one hospital as a nurse and I get excited about continuing education and then I figure out my state or my hospital systems need for continuing education. Then there’s more hospitals, and in the United States there’s 49 more states who may have like slightly different requirements. I’m not saying it’s easy to rinse and repeat like, oh, I did it in Ohio, now I’m gonna do it in South Dakota. But the scale of where you can go with this is pretty impressive because continuing education and licenses. Tend to be subdivided by state boundaries as an example. Or even different countries have different requirements or maybe you figure out a model and then you can change the geography. You could potentially change the language oh, maybe I’m gonna hire somebody to come into my organization to do this in Spanish. And then we’ll go after the Spanish speaking continuing education market for the people that are in the exact same role as the English speaking world. And it just goes when you start seeing all these like layers of how you could expand. It’s really interesting. And, but sometimes, like with a lot of these that I’ve seen, the entrepreneur gets to the point where they don’t need to expand. They’re I’m good, I’ve. I’m making enough here. I’ve been able to pivot from employee to entrepreneur. I’ve built a team, we’re doing well, everybody’s making enough money, we’re good. But there really is, I’m not saying unlimited upside, but there’s a lot of upside potential for just taking it to a slightly different market or even it’s Yeah. Or different geography, different language, different niche, even. Because some industries operate very similar I’m trying to think of a specific example. There could be something that happens in a lawyer continuing education that’s also relevant to like a judge or court system continuing education or something that the person who ends up needing that is in a slightly different role. There’s just all these pivots that are just like stacked up and ready to be tested if you have the capacity, desire, and ability to expand.  Kurt Von Ahnen: We’re so disconnected. My, my brain went right to bartending. Okay? So I have a client that has a bartending course.  Chris Badgett: Does bar do, bartenders do continuing education.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Turns out that bartenders have continuing education and in the state of California you have to be certified to be a bartender.  Chris Badgett: Okay,  Kurt Von Ahnen: I wasn’t aware of this. So one of the things I did as an agency was I connected the state of California’s website to our customer’s lifter, LMS website. So people actually register through the state of California, they get their student id. That student ID becomes part of their lifter, LMS id, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it goes on. Yeah. But to your point. That client recognized that California is not the only state that requires a certification for that. And so they’ve worked with other states and we’ve created automations for them that connect the lifter LMS reporting data to those sponsored states, if that’s the way to say that. So that the states sell the training, he gets the revenue. The reporting goes back to those states and the states get copies of their certifications with every recertification and they have to be re-certified every two years. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you just,  Kurt Von Ahnen: it’s amazing. It’s just an ATM machine after that.  Chris Badgett: And I just thought of another PI pivot, which is like public sector, private sector, government sector. Like for example, like doctors or nurses. There’s different sectors. There’s also nurses in the military who need training. And maybe I don’t, I’m not an expert in military medicine, but there’s still nurses, there’s still doctors. They still need their stuff. And the gov governments do contracts all the time where they’re not, everything is provided 100% in-house.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: So, all these pivots or just verticals pop up once you nail one. Obviously stay with it, perfect it, but look around a little bit and see where else you can expand into  Kurt Von Ahnen: land and expand.  Chris Badgett: That’s it. So if you’re looking to land and expand and you’re looking for, you’re intrigued by this I wanna encourage you to check out lifter LMS and the continuing education. I do wanna mention our continuing education add-on works no matter what you call it. So this is part of the software and all our research and everything. You can rename it to CME, continuing medical education, pdu professional development units or whatever your, there’s a lot of lingo and vernacular in all this. But like Kurt was saying in the beginning of this episode, it’s very similar to corporate training. It’s all not as different as you think. It’s just more about the application and the use case and the purpose and who you’re selling to and how they need their certificates and stuff. But the end of the day, it’s still courses that have continuing education attached to them. So check out Lifter, LMS if you want an agency to help you with this. Kurtz got a very unique set of experience as a education provider himself, as a manager, a leader, a trainer as a website, WordPress lifter, L-M-S-C-E-U, niche, massive amounts of experience in all of that. So check out Manana, NOMAS for that and we wanna hear from you. I love interviewing on this podcast, continuing education entrepreneurs ’cause their stories are so cool. Not just because they build great businesses, but it’s often a lot of lifestyle stuff. You know what, just like Kurt said, I was, I’ve been in this industry for 30 years. I either wasn’t financially ready to retire, or I just didn’t wanna stop working and I still love my industry, or I wanted to figure out how to do a business with my partner or my friends and make it happen. I’ve seen it in my local community where doctors are. Conspiring on, we need to get in this continuing education game. I’m like, guys, I got a learning management system over here. Let’s, talk about this. And they’re like, oh, you know about that stuff. I’m like,  Kurt Von Ahnen: oh  Chris Badgett: I do. Check out Lifter LMS. Check out Manna Nomas, and if you have questions about building a continuing education platform or how any of this works, check it out if you’re sitting on a backlog. SCORM content as an example. We have a whole free course on the lifter LMS Academy, how to integrate with that. We also teach you if you wanna do hybrid, if you’re moving away from scorm and you have a, you want to use a more modern WordPress content management system for creating your e-learning. We show you how to ride in both worlds. Anything’s possible. But thank you Kurt, for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. And reach out to lifter LMS and Manana nomas with any kind of continuing education question. We’re unique in the space and that we’ve really been around this industry from a long, for a long time in a lot of different angles and have seen people. Even from the very early days of lifter LMS, which is 2013, immediately start using it for continuing education and our certificate system and making it work. Fast forward 12, 13 years, it’s now super set up and frictionless for continuing education and I just would love to see you use it. Check it out. Thank you so much, Kurt, for coming on the show. We will do this again down the road.  Speaker 2: 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post The Secret World Of Continuing Education Entrepreneurship appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Kurt Von Ahnen from MANANA NO MAS, demonstrates in this LMScast episode that even if you are certain of your knowledge, you must validate an online course. Since he thought his ideas would succeed, he acknowledges that as an entrepreneur, he used to detest validation. However, experience has shown him that ignoring validation results in a waste of time, money, and energy. He highlights the need for creators to think like entrepreneurs and consider long-term viability, profitability, and demand in addition to their passion. One of his best lessons is about pricing: when he first offered his program for $1,500, it didn’t sell because people thought it was too inexpensive rather than because it wasn’t worth it. Significant price increases resulted in higher sales, demonstrating that assessing perceived worth and willingness to pay is part of validation. Additionally, he emphasizes that various price points necessitate various sales procedures, ranging from straightforward checkout pages to protracted relationship-based sales cycles. Kurt promotes testing concepts on sites like YouTube or in-person meetings, asking viewers directly if they would sign up, and making sure that feedback is provided by actual customers rather than friends or relatives. In the end, he emphasizes that validation is continuous, flexible, and closely related to knowing who drives purchasing decisions, what the market really desires, and whether or not your product-market fit is genuine—not presumed. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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 LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Kurt Von Ahnen from Manana Nomas. Kurt also works with Lifter LMS. You’ve seen him on some of our live calls, many of them. Actually. Today we’re gonna get into how to validate an online course before you build it. We’re gonna go a little deeper in this one than the usual advice, which is good advice to pre-sale and put up a landing page and all that. But we’re gonna go into more detail around validation to save you a lot of time, energy, and money. But first, welcome back on the show, Kurt.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Thanks Chris. It’s always awesome to have a chat. Chris Badgett: I love validation. Partially because as an entrepreneur, which. You are, and many of the listeners out there are. Opportunity all around you. So I know when I’m hanging out with my entrepreneur friends and we go to a restaurant as an example, you’ll see you’ll start constructing in your mind like, oh, this many plates, the food costs this much. And you start you just start thinking like a entrepreneur, like a business person. Oh. Or you’re at a conference and you’re like, oh, how much money do they make from this conference? There’s 2000 people here. The tickets were this much. Anyways, but part of that entrepreneur brain is that you have your radar up and you’re just scanning the environment. Entrepreneurs are, they’re often seen as risky, but they’re actually risk averse, so they’re like looking for risks and opportunity, but part of that scanning brain that you have. Is for finding and validating a good course idea or online business or coaching program, or multi instructor school or whatever it is that you’re building. So let’s dig into validation. I feel like the radar comes in handy. I can’t turn it off. That’s how you know, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you have that kind of brain and no matter what you do, you just can’t turn it off. It’s always there. You’re an entrepreneur that’s called the entrepreneur personality type. But validation is, more like harnessing that awareness and that scanning to a really specific target. Should I focus on this project? How do I know it will work? How do I reduce wasted time, energy, and money? So before even you get to the sales page part. Like pre-selling, which lifter, LMS is an example, has all the tools you need to set that up. Technically, that’s the, in many ways, the easy part. Once you learn the mechanics of that and you’re, you get good at writing a sales page. But one of my biggest tips that I think people don’t talk about a lot is if you’re a subject matter expert in a space following other subject matter experts in the space. Just basically keeping tabs on your market. So like I know what’s going on at SaaS LMS companies, I’m watching their marketing, I’m on their email list, I’m watching them launch products, and I’m not looking for something to copy. What I’m actually looking for is demand. Oh, when do people get really excited about something? Not the company, but the customers. And when you’re in a topic. One of my favorite things to do is to look at Amazon. So if I have a course idea as an example, and let’s say I am, I’m really into I’m just using a real example of beekeeping and I have done beekeeping courses before. In that case, I actually did it with one of the top beekeepers in Montana, so I had him be the expert. But if you know anything about beekeeping when you go to amazon.com. Look at books or other products, you’ll see the number of reviews. And beekeeping is actually like this huge thing that is all over the world. And so there’s like a river of demand there. With you with power sports there, there’s like certain magazines people read. There’s certain forums they go on, there’s certain podcasts they listen to. So the first layer of validation is, and this comes in the last episode, we talked about the difference between grandiosity and shame. Sometimes in the grandiose mindset, you don’t need anybody. You’re just like, I got it. I’m gonna crush this. I’ve, got my blinders on. Keeping your finger on the pulse of not just your, not really your competitors. It’s more like the people who have problems that you wanna serve and seeing what they’re up to, seeing what people are trying to sell to them, seeing what their complaints are on social media and reviews, YouTube comments everywhere. And these aren’t platforms that you own, so it’s free. It just takes time to keep your finger on the pulse. What do you think about keeping your finger on the pulse in your niche?  Kurt Von Ahnen: I’m sitting here grinning to myself because this is one thing where you and I have a fairly large disconnect, Chris. Chris Badgett: Okay.  Kurt Von Ahnen: From an entrepreneur standpoint. I hated validation. You’re like, I love validation. I’m like, I hated validation. I was like, I know what I’m doing. I know it’s the best I’m gonna, I’m gonna forge forward. I’m gonna make this thing happen. And as an agency, I’ve had a lot of clients that have been that way where I already know I’m an expert. I know what I’m gonna do. This is gonna be awesome. I’m gonna make a million dollars. And it’s no, we gotta slow this down. ’cause now I’m an agency. And now I’m like, we gotta slow this down. You gotta validate this thing. You gotta figure out what is the market, what is, what’s it gonna take to bring it to market? And then what’s your margin gonna be? And you gotta think it through. For instance, and just like you said, going to restaurants and stuff, I love to cook. Like anyone that knows me on social knows I love to cook. And I always think, wouldn’t it be so cool to have a food truck? Wouldn’t it be cool to have a food truck and then. I go to Sandhill Brewery and at Sandhills Brewing, someone’s, they do a kitchen takeover and they were selling these like they were awesome, Sam. It was like 15 bucks. Awesome. Like it was a great plate for 15 bucks. But I said to my son, I said, there’s 25 people here, and if all 25 people bought a plate for 15 bucks and there’s four people making the plates, how much did each person make? And he’s Ooh, that’s not so good. I’m like, yeah, that’s not so good. You gotta figure out what does it actually look like? Because whether you think you’re running your course as a business, or you’re running your course as a hobby at the end of the world, it’s gotta pay for itself somehow some way. So you gotta validate it, whether you like it or not. You gotta validate it.  Chris Badgett: And here’s the funny part I’ve had, this is a direct thing that I’ve done, is. At Lifter LMS we have validated that there is a lot of demand for agencies that build websites that to be familiar with LMS and e-commerce and all the, needs of the e-learning website. It’s a niche that you could build an entire agency on. So I like scream from the mountaintops hello WordPress professionals and website building pros. Of which I come from this, I was one of these and I did it all. I did restaurants, real estate agents, psychics coaches, course crew. I’ve done all of it. So first you just gotta do what you gotta do to survive as an agency. But we’ve probably been asked the question 2000 times like, Hey, this software looks great. Do you know anybody who can help? Build a site for me. I, have validated there is a river of demand here.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: And but as an entrepreneur, like as an agency you can be scrappy and just be like, I need to take whatever comes in the door, which I totally respect that and understand that. But there are LMS specific agencies. Magna Nomas is one. And I’m sure you take some projects sometimes maybe that are outside the scope or on the edge a little bit or whatever, maybe not. But there’s validated demand for, in the same way that there’s validated demand. If we’re talking about WordPress, WooCommerce is really complicated. You can do a whole agency where all you do is WooCommerce work. Yeah. WooCommerce, the product has validated that for you. And not everybody who does, who buys software, wants to set it up, learn how to do everything, and customize it and all that. So there’s just that validation there. In terms of validating before you create the course. This is why I love YouTubers. If you’re on a, it is so much easier to make one YouTube video than be like, I’m gonna make a course. So even if you’re a subject matter expert and you’re like, I wanna do this course business, this is my topic. I would, if I could wave a magic wand, you’re gonna need to learn how to make video. In most cases when you do online education, you might as well get some practice and make some videos.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah,  Chris Badgett: and the crazy thing about YouTube, and at this point I’ve been on YouTube like 18 years or something like that, and Lifter has, 2000 videos or something on the channel. I am always shocked. I never know in advance which videos will take off organically. That’s the market that is validation. Like it you, make assumptions, which we talked about in the last episode, but then you find this little spot of validation.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Boom.  Chris Badgett: Right?  Kurt Von Ahnen: So the perfect use case for that is Emily Middleton, one of our team members. Chris Badgett: Yeah,  Kurt Von Ahnen: so Emily will, people will ask her questions and then enough people ask enough questions and she goes, you know what? I should probably just make a YouTube video about this. Then she makes a YouTube video about it, like how to, make a custom course catalog with Elementor, right? And it’s that’s one of the one videos that just keeps taking off and keeps taking off and keeps taking off. And she’s made hundreds of others. But that’s the one that just keeps going, and to me, it’s so amazing that, she’s been able to create like a whole niche outta that. If you look at how she actually runs her agency and you did a podcast with her recently, it’s like she jumps on Zoom and runs people through things and answers those questions like in real time. And that’s that is a perfect example of this is what validation looks like. You had an idea, you sampled the idea, the sample was positive, so now you optimize the idea.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s I call it active listening. If you’re listening, a lot of what you’re doing is like research, which requires listening. Like you have to listen to your market. If you’re just trying to steamroll them with all your assumptions, you’re gonna have a lot less success than if you listen and spend time like exploring your space and reading all those comments and reviews. It’s, so powerful. And also, the other thing is that this is where pivots come from is like you mentioned in the last episode about you were, you realized you were selling to the wrong person. And so like your validation test with the wrong person failed. But then once you pivoted to the boss of the business or whatever. And then that started to click and validate. And that doesn’t mean that course was a failure or anything like that. It just means you had to validate an assumption about who it was for, which sounds like we all think we know who it’s for or they just want our information. But there’s a lot of detail in that. Like one way with that specific example that you have to, one of the things you have to validate is who’s gonna make the buying decision? Sometimes you’re gonna do marketing to a, to let’s say to kids, but the parent is actually gonna make the buying decis decision. Or you’re going to market to the parents, but the kid’s gonna make the buying decision. Or it is a spousal arrangement. And you realize for your your, let’s call it like save your marriage course. You need to get buy-in from both parties for this thing to move forward. And maybe one, the husband is on board, but it’s not really landing with the wives or whatever. All that has to be validated and tested.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s it’s interesting to me how many people. Because we’re talking about validating and, making sure like, checking the boxes. How many people forge forward without those basic tenants in place?  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kurt Von Ahnen: So like you mentioned YouTube. What do you think are like viable ways to validate an idea? Because I’m sure I’m thinking about like the listeners and the viewers of this podcast right now, right? So they’re thinking I don’t have a YouTube following. Or I don’t have, I’m not part of a Facebook group, right? So it’s so, then you have to think of things out of the box and go, so how would you validate your idea before you invest in creating a whole course and a website and a, platform to offer that to people? How would you validate it?  Chris Badgett: This actually reminds me of the, interview we did with Marcus Carter recently. Some of that is or has assumptions to be challenged. If you don’t have a following, that doesn’t mean you still can’t validate on social media as an example. So when Marcus started and he told this story, he started on TikTok and he, grew really quickly to hundreds of thousands of views and follows or whatever. But then he realized that the TikTok audience wa was not the best to lead into the sale, but he got some validation SIG signal, so he pivoted to Instagram. And let me back up and say, one of the great things about TikTok is it gives everybody a fair shot. It doesn’t matter if you’re a popular influencer with tons of followers or you’re, this is your first TikTok video. TikTok will give. They, will surface the content. They will test the content on people and then surface it and spread it if it’s if the market likes it. So TikTok is a really interesting place to look. That’s newer in our space. But ultimately what Marcus realized is he got strong validation from TikTok. He then got strong validation from Instagram, but ultimately he knew that he had to get to YouTube in order to connect his social media marketing efforts to actual sales. But he found his way there through confirmations of validation while testing different platforms as social media platforms as a vehicle for lead generation for him. Now he puts almost all of his efforts into YouTube and everything’s working great. So there’s a lot of testing there. I think you’re muted, Kurt. Kurt Von Ahnen: That was ’cause of my dog. It’s so interesting that you mentioned the TikTok thing. I recently just got permission from TikTok to go live and I didn’t have it before, and I think anyone that watches knows, like I’m on five podcasts a week. I’m all over, like I’m all over YouTube, I’m all over the place. But I wasn’t really big on TikTok. And then I got this chance to go live on TikTok, and it was on a weird Sunday morning and it just came up and I said, okay, let’s try it. And my first try going live on TikTok, I did 28 minutes. I had over 250 people show up and interact on the live.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kurt Von Ahnen: And I was like, that has never happened On a live podcast through Streamy Yard, through Facebook, through YouTube, through Instagram, through anything like TikTok is a huge channel to just sample a broad audience. And see do people even like the crud that’s coming outta my face? And then it turned out that some people did. So now, that put you in this different position where you go, okay, so what do I do with this new data set? Do I create in this channel or do I create in a different channel? Or do I try to redirect this channel to something else that I’m currently working on? And that’s the challenge for every creator as they come into the space.  Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Another area that we need to validate, and this is critically important, is price. And this is every market has like a willingness to pay, an ability to pay a perception of value of what you’re offering. I was at a software entrepreneur conference and there was one of the top software pricing experts on the wall and hi, the way he started his talk on the stage. His name is Patrick Campbell. He walked out and he held a finger up in the air and he said, let me guess. When all of you picked the prices for your software, you just held a finger up in the air and just guessed. And the the whole audience was like, felt like busted at the moment. And he went into a whole science of pricing and, all that. But price testing and validation is super important. First you have to be like, reasonable are we selling to. CEO executives, are we selling to young parents? Are we selling to a new entrepreneur? Are we selling mid mar like when we, pricing is not something you should just completely guess on, but you need to test it. And one of the ways to do that’s very common in the course creation and membership site space. A strong validation is when you do your first launch. Remember, we’re just trying to go from zero to one or zero to some is okay. Based on all my research, competitor analysis, the willingness to pay the perceived value of my product, I really think I can get $500 for this thing. I’m gonna give my founding people like 50 or even 80% off on my first launch. So you’re still validating. You’re trying to, you’re trying to get a large enough sample size in that you can really test your course and your product. But people have to break out their wallet. This is why one thing that gets people stuck is they will try to validate with friends and family that aren’t even in the niche. And mom, brother, sister, friend says. Oh, honey this is, great. I love this. You’re so good on camera, right? This is gonna be awesome, but they’re not in your target market. They didn’t pay anything. They love you and are trying to support you. It can’t be helpful to get a second set of eyes on your stuff. But what you really need is your markets set of eyes and your market’s wallet and credit card information. There’s arguments where you can try to just make ’em pay $1. Will they pull out their credit card at all? That’s a validation test of in and of itself, but I’m more of a fan of do the founding early adopter cohort through your product like we did in lifter LMS in 2013. It also came with special privileges. It also came with more intimate access. It came with the ability to shape the future of the product since it’s so new. We’re not just gonna invent out of our mind exactly what we know a hundred percent that the market needs. We want to hear from you and hear where else are your pains? Or how can we help you more and really co-create a product. I’m a big fan of that. Of Lifter has been co-created. We very much listen to our market. Kurt Von Ahnen: You, you are hitting on so many things. It’s, you’re almost, I’m almost having PTSD thinking about how I grew the Powersport Academy. If you remember Chris. You helped me with some copy on the pages and, I wasn’t really hitting the right people and, then when I started to hit the right people, they still weren’t buying. And I was originally offering my training in a very specific niche that was like 1500 bucks. 1200 bucks, 1500 bucks. That was like what I thought I would sell it for. I thought if I got 200 people to take this at 1500 bucks. That’s gonna gimme a year’s worth of money. That’s what I thought. That’s, so that’s the finger in the air. I also call that SaaS math. We do that in software companies. It is like the old. Christmas thing. Oh if I could just get a million people to gimme $1, I’d be a millionaire. Yeah. But that’s it’s optimistic thinking.  No, it didn’t work. And so then I did a validation process where I put seven dealerships that, that I knew where, I had a personal relationship with the people running those dealerships. I said, I’m gonna put you into this training and I want you to take this training. And then, and the thing is you have to give me the feedback. What’s missing, what’s good, what’s great, what’s horrible, what sucks. Don’t worry about my personal feelings, just gimme what your feedback is. And what was weird about this particular product was the feedback was this training’s awesome. It’s the best training we’ve ever had. We’re making more money than we’ve ever made and that, that’s awesome feedback. But the feedback I got after that, Chris was the one that changed the entire way that I ran my project. And that was, my boss would never have bought this. And I said what do you mean? And all seven of the dealerships said, my boss would never have bought this. And I said, why? What do you mean? And they said you’re offering all this really cool training and all this great advancement. We’ve gotten really great results from it. But for 1500 bucks, they’re just expecting it to be junk. And I thought coming in from, a, corporate training perspective to a course creator perspective, I thought the 1500 bucks was like a, this giant reach, because I was used to course creator selling things for $49, right? So I thought, oh, I’m gonna go from $49 or 1500 bucks. Nobody, I’m gonna struggle to sell it. For that. I had to raise the price to $12,000 before people started to see the value in it and purchase it. Now we currently offer that training at 4,640 $6,000 a year per dealership. And so people that hear this podcast or that know me from other channels, they’re gonna go, oh my gosh, he’s getting 45 grand a client, blah, blah. Like it sounds huge. Oh my God, he is got this giant training project. And it’s no, the price has to match the value of what you’re offering because if the price doesn’t match the value, the purchaser. Is gonna assume it’s not gonna meet the standard. So, you really like when you talk about validation isn’t just, is it worth the $49? Is it worth the 1 49, the 1 79, the 1 99? Sometimes it’s, is it worth the 1500 bucks? Is it worth the $12,000? Is it worth the $40,000 like you really have to sell based on value? And you really don’t know what the value is until you validate it and you get the feedback from other people.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, and this is a problem we have at Lifter LMS as an example. ’cause we wanna make the software a approachable from a price perspective and we even have a free, the free core. But when it comes to a lot of people who would in businesses that would really benefit from Lifter, they see it as so cheap. Compared to the expensive enterprise LMS they’re using, which has per instructor, per course, per student pricing and all these fees that it seems like impossible. And I’m not saying everybody out there raise your prices a hundred x I’m just saying you have to find your sweet spot in the, pricing game and, you have, the only way to really find it is to test it. Not just copy competitors. You can look at that for a data point. And then there’s this whole thing where you have to build your product around the price in a way. I think of Ziv Aviv, who’s been on this podcast who teaches people how to tie animal balloons and built a million dollar business around that kid, entertainers, clowns that sign up for his program because they’re, they wanna. Do better animal balloons and all the stuff they do, which is a really interesting niche, Ziv has to play a volume game. ’cause these folks are not gonna spend thousands of dollars for this. So he has to do a lower price because that’s what that market is willing to pay and he needs to go after more people. But if you go up market like you’re doing and you’re selling to businesses that bring in team members and stuff like that that. Often requires like a more high touch experience, less self-study, more live delivery feedback on assignments or whatever.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Well,  Chris Badgett: so pricing and product is a dance and whatever your first guess is, I can almost guarantee you it’s suboptimal. Speaker 3: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. People don’t like to talk about it. Because I, ’cause I notice a lot of the entrepreneur meetups I go to, people don’t talk about the sales pipeline very much, but the pipeline is very much in tune with what the value is that you’re offering. And so if my course is $49, that sales pipeline is 15 minutes. If my course is $1,500, that sales pipeline might be 45 days. If my course is $45,000, that sales pipeline is. Nine to 12 months. And so I’ve got to understand that, my potential clients might see the Powersport Academy. They might see it now January, 2026, but they might not sign up until March of 27. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, a very real thing. And just a pro tip on what Kurt’s talking about with pipeline and how it changes based on price point. The way you convert the sales also needs validation. So as a simple rule of thumb a low priced offer can convert off. I call these conversion tools. You can convert off of a landing page, a sales page. That’s it. So this is from $1 to $500, even a thousand sometimes. And these aren’t hard and fast, there’s exceptions. But then when you start getting into the mid ticket range, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 grand, you’re gonna, they’re gonna want to talk to you. A lot of people don’t pull out the credit card for multi-thousand dollar purchases without talking to you and. If you’re on the lower end of that’s where you see like a webinar sales funnel. So you want to fill your pipeline with prospects that come to that webinar, which allows you, because it’s a group format, it’s not eating your lunch for time. ’cause you’re doing a bunch of one off and then you get into high ticket, like 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 on up. You need to have some one-on-one calls. Nobody is going to just pull out, go to a landing page. And process that information. It is possible. By the way, I just wanna note that in Stripe, ’cause I’ve looked into this like lifter, LMS is a stripe integration. The most that you’re, that will go through now, this is assuming you have a huge limit on your credit card, is $99,999 and 99 cents. But good luck doing that from a sales page. And by the way, if you’re up there, you’re probably gonna be looking at things like. Bank transfers and bank checks and different. So all of these are assumptions.  Kurt Von Ahnen: I I was gonna say that the manual payment gateway and lifter has been a godsend.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Kurt Von Ahnen: Because I don’t wanna pay 2.9% plus 30 cents on $45,000.  Chris Badgett: So how do you do it? Do you do a check or A transfer or,  Kurt Von Ahnen: typically it’s an A CH transfer.  Chris Badgett: Aach H.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. And it usually comes from a line of credit from the Wells Fargo account,  Chris Badgett: right? Yeah. And all these,  Kurt Von Ahnen: that’s business to business, right? Like when you get into the B2B sales, things are completely different than B2C. Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s also where you need to validate the, like the information you’re getting. If you’re selling mid-market and up where Kurt’s talking about, but you’re studying what scrappy course creators and coaches are doing, that’s not, and what they’re recommending, that strategy may work better for the individual buyer or the very small business buyer versus like a corporation. So you might spend way too much time building out, sales page marketing funnel for something that needs a completely different conversion tool. The other thing I just wanna note on validation is growing an audience before selling a product is a great way to validate. The whole idea of getting everything done and you have zero people to sell to is very, it is a very difficult situation to be in. This is why I recommend starting a YouTube channel, and you can also play to your strengths. So if you’re a writer, start a blog or a newsletter. If you’re a video creator, start a YouTube. If you like to talk, start a podcast and have ways on those sites to have email capture and start building that list way before you need it. If I could wave a magic wand. Let’s say you’re the type of person who is looking to exit your day job. I would spend two years just giving away value for free while building a, an email list, a social following, and all those things before I even thought about like the exact specifics of the product and pre-selling and all that. So audience building, when somebody gives you their email address, it’s a very important step in validation.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Can I, is it okay? We’ve got a lot of time. I wanna I wanna take you back to something you did to me. I wanna say three years ago. Okay. You told me about Ziv and the balloon animals thing and I lost my mind. Chris Badgett: Everybody loves that story. I like to tell it because it is, it makes you think if that guy can do it, what’s wrong with me? And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Ziv is a wonderful guy. Yeah. I love talking to him. He’s been on here. But when people hear that. I’m not trying to hurt their feelings, but they feel a little dejected just from how we compare ourselves to others. Right?  Kurt Von Ahnen: So I lost my mind. So let’s go back to, I lost my mind. I thought to myself, I’m smart, I’m intelligent. I’ve got the best training product. I’m, I can’t sell nothing. And this guy’s making bank off of balloon animals. Are you freaking kidding me?  Chris Badgett: Right?  Kurt Von Ahnen: And then you said, this is when, as a private conversation with you and I can’t remember if it was Zoom or a phone call, but you said Kurt, it’s all product market fit. It’s he’s answering what people really want. Maybe what and it made me think maybe I’m in the wrong market. And you said what do you really love to do? And it was right when I was doing the Great Cycle Challenge where we, every September I ride to raise money for kids’ cancer. I’m a bicyclist and every year. They have this Facebook page, and every year, 14 or 15,000 people go into this Facebook page and ask the dumbest questions about bicycling. But because I’m a bicycling person, I answer a ton of them, right? What kind of pedals? What kind of saddle? What kind of shorts? What kind of top, what kind of water bottle? What kind of protein to take before you go on a ride? How do you get, how do you ride longer? How do you ride faster? How do you ride? Like all these things, answer all these questions. And you told me on that phone call, you said you should just ask that Facebook group if they would want to take a course on how to be a better bicyclist. And I said, that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. And then I went into the group and I said, Hey. My name’s Kurt. I answer a lot of questions on this page, and I just want to know if I gave you free access to a course, how many people on this list right now would want to take a course on bicycling from the basics? And do you remember what that was three years ago?  Chris Badgett: I don’t.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Within two days, 600 people responded to that post and said, I’m in. Yeah, I’m in. And I’m like, okay. So for the Great Cycle Challenge, we’re all raising money for kids’ cancer. I guess I would give them free access. I could give ’em a voucher or a hundred percent off coupon and they could take it for free. But then I would have an evergreen course that I could sell to every other bicyclist in the country for $29 or $49 or whatever. The product market fit would be there because I would already have 600 active users in my bicycle training course.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. This is the power of the free course lead magnet. Like it’s, that’s another thing to do to validate is don’t make the main premium product, do a free mini course that adds value and that’s gonna help you build your list. There’s a lot less friction ’cause there’s no money involved. You get the feedback loop open and you start talking to people, which takes me to where I want to land it. This is the craziest part of validation. The crazy irony of it all is that what you think your superpower is, your market likely sees something completely different, and so I may wanna. Make a course about you and I, Kurt, are both into leadership and stuff like that. I like leadership and management. So if I decide to like, make a course for f first time managers and give them some, a basic toolkit to like how to manage an organization and lead teams and things like that, I would enjoy that. I would love that. But I know what would happen. If I go around and talk to people and like basically the question is based on everything you know about me what’s my superpower? Another way people say it is or is just to ask yourself, what do people keep asking you for advice on? Because the weird thing is that the thing we’re often the best at in our superpower for us as a subject matter expert or whatever that angle is, I. What were our greatest strengths or come on autopilot to us that we don’t recognize the value and how far we’ve come, or maybe so much time has passed that we forgot about everything that went into developing that skill or that expertise. So that’s something else that has to be validated. If you’re somebody who’s interested in a lot of different topics. That’s an area where validation is really key, because like Kurt is like this, he’s really into bikes. He’s really into mechanics. He’s really into leadership. He’s written books. And thank you for the comment there, but the you don’t know you, you really don’t know. You’re making a giant assumption and. This is why and oftentimes people won’t tell you like you have to ask or really dig. This is like the effort and the work of validation is, you know what’s, I’ll just do it right here with you, Kurt. Like when I look at Kurt he’s great at so many things and I’m not picking one or saying, oh, you should do a course about this. But he’s really great at managing a room of people. Which is a unique skill. You probably feel like it’s just natural. It comes to you. Last night you organized a meetup in your local town. You or you hold space for group meetings in the lifter LMS audience. You’re just a I’ve watched you operate a conference and like at an event or a party or whatever, you know how to work a room and just hold space. You’re obviously really good at the tech stuff. You have your whole power sports stuff and motorcycles and bicycles, stuff like you have so much, but the more people you survey that know you in this life and previous lives, or people that have been with you for a long time and like have seen your trajectory. You’d be shocked to find out we’re so close to our top strengths, that they’re often invisible to us, and that’s like a tragedy of it all. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you should make a completely different course about x. It just means maybe your angle or your approach to the topic, you need to integrate more of the superpower into that. And it’s just interesting.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a book called Strength Finders that a lot of corporations will send to their directors and developers. And and that’s the whole idea of focus on your strengths and not try to fix yourself through fixing your weaknesses. And that, that’s like this topic of validation, right? So what are the strong points? What do you really knock it outta the park with? How can you put yourself forward in the best positive light forward and newsflash. If you identify that there’s something that you lack that’s not an obstacle, that’s not a dead end, that’s an opportunity for you to go, okay, who can I bring in to bring up this thing I’m lacking. So if you lack on the tech side, we have the experts page. If you’re lacking on a concept side, bring in a coach. If you’re lacking on sales, bring in someone that can help you with the marketing. It’s there’s all kinds of ways to find success in your project.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just, I wanna share one more thing that I noticed this morning, which makes me smile. I was on Twitter and this is what somebody who’s operating in a space has really done a lot of validation and really figured it out. This guy’s name is Danko, spelled KOE, and he I was listening to his podcast, this is five years ago or something. He’s creator economy, solo person, solopreneur business creating he is big on digital writing and stuff like that. And I was listening to his podcast and every time I’d ever talk to anybody I’d be like, Hey, have you guys ever heard of Danko? And everybody said, no. And then I’m listening to one of his like long hour and a half things and on the podcast, and he was like. He’s I really understand my market. If you’re here listening to me, you’re probably an INFJ, which is the Myers-Briggs personality type. There’s 16 of them. I am an INFJ. I’m like, I got it. That’s why none of my people are, have heard of this guy. And INFJ by the way, is one of the, in the Myers-Briggs framework has a very small percentage compared to the other types. And to be a male, INFJ is also more rare just in terms of the mix. So he was an INFJ, and he realized that his market was people like him that were this like strange personality type. So sometimes when you go to. Your market the biggest mistake you could make is try to sell to everybody. But then you find like these niches of who are the people that listen to me and vibe with me? Your vibe attracts your tribe thing, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sell to people exactly like you, but you will over time realize and validate like the particular type of person. That is gonna be a good fit for you and your training. So that’s just, it’s just more clarification on the who, that kind of work is never done, like still as a mature business. I’m still obsessed with figuring out with who, who are these education entrepreneurs? Who are these forward folk facing WordPress, LMS agencies that move with complex technology who are keep leveling up ’cause the internet and tools are changing so fast. Who are these people? I’m constantly asking that and challenging my own assumptions of who our customer is. Sweet. That’s a wrap. Go validate. Don’t give up. And build an audience first if you can. And just know that the work of validation actually never ends, but it’s the most important in the beginning. And you have to get past the imposter syndrome and the, and everything else to make sure that you’re open to challenging your assumptions, and that’s just part of the process. It’s not a problem. It’s just part of the process.  Kurt Von Ahnen: It’s fluid.  Chris Badgett: It’s totally fluid. That’s it for this episode of LMScast, and we will catch you on the next one. Speaker 2: 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Validate An Online Course To Maximize Your Success appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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. Speaker 3: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.  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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Deal with the Failed Online Course Business appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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. Speaker 3: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.  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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Launch Your First Course As Quickly As Possible appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen elaborates on the notion that corporate training is a continuous process that changes with the company rather than a one-time event. He argues that many businesses put off documenting their procedures because they think things will change all the time. However, when teams expand, this kind of thinking frequently results in confusion, inefficiency, and knowledge loss. Kurt Von Ahnen is known as a highly skilled corporate training and e-learning specialist who has worked with LifterLMS for more than ten years. Before working directly with the LifterLMS team and starting his own company, Manana No Mas, which focuses on LifterLMS and WordPress-based training solutions. Businesses establish clarity and consistency even when processes change by documenting them early on through lessons, screen recordings, and organized training. Kurt highlights that corporate training reduces risk when people go and stops the emergence of unhealthy “this is how we really do it” workarounds by transferring knowledge from individuals to the firm itself. Beyond onboarding, he notes that training may be used for a variety of strategic objectives, such as enhancing sales effectiveness, assisting with customer education, uniting teams around common standards, and raising business valuation. By combining training materials into a single, adaptable platform, assigning content by role or group, and continuously improving their internal “business product,” WordPress and LifterLMS enable organizations to transform training from a reactive expense into a key driver of stability, scalability, and long-term growth. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 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 LMScast. We’re joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Kurt Von Onan from Manana Nomas. He also works directly with LifterLMS. Kurt is awesome. He’s been around the LifterLMS project for a decade or so, a very long time. Uh, Kurt started as. LifterLMS user started coming to our office hours, then got a job doing some work for LifterLMS. He has an agency called Mon Ana Nomas and does a bunch of lifter projects. Uh, I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with Kurt at various conferences and things. Kurt’s awesome. He has a lot of unique experience. We’re gonna be diving deep into corporate training and using WordPress and. LifterLMS and other tools to solve a different kind of e-learning use case, which is corporate training, which is very different from being a subject matter expert trying to make money on the internet selling courses to any people all over the world. Corporate training is very different, but first, welcome back on the show, Kurt.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, it’s awesome to be back, man. I love having chats with you.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, I love to get into your experience ’cause you have so many stories and so much unique experience. Uh, from your career and just in life, but let’s start, for those out there listening who may be a little fuzzy on exactly what corporate training is, how, how would you define it? Both like at the large scale, maybe the medium scale and the small scale?  Kurt Von Ahnen: Well. Corporate training, it, some people say, well it’s just course creation and it’s not. They’re, they’re, they really are separate entities in how they function, how they work, how they, how they do. So corporate training really is the idea that, you know, any kind of function or process within a corporate frame set should be documented and disseminated to the staff in an organized way. And, and that’s like, that’s the elevator speech for corporate training. And then from an e-learning perspective, that’s kind of, it’s, it’s almost still like an evolution in process, Chris, because there’s so many things. From an HR standpoint that that haven’t seemed to gotten to, you know, corporate training yet. There’s so many things that have the potential to be put into corporate training, which in turn would add to productivity, efficiency, and profit for these companies that, that haven’t fully adopted yet.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I like that definition a lot like documenting process. And I was coaching an entrepreneur the other day who was having trouble. With getting a team member really invested in their standard operating procedures, and I gave them a framework which was, Hey, try to coach this person into the idea that we’re building two products. We have our main product that we sell to the public, but the business is also a product.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah,  Chris Badgett: so in this case it was a software company, so our users have documentation. But we also need documentation for the business product and present that in a organized way. Like LifterLMS as an example, is not a Fortune 500 company, as you know, it’s a small business, but we have our own corporate training, which is powered by LifterLMS. We use the LifterLMS private site add-on. We use the courses in our case to represent different key parts of the business, like. Marketing, uh, support operations and so on. Each of those are courses. And then we use the lesson structure for individual trainings or standard operating procedures. And the cool thing with corporate training in my small business use case, it gets really, it can be hard to get the momentum going, but it gets to be kind of fun when people start using it, contributing to it, and not just like. The owner is creating everything. Everybody’s working on it, making it better, like basically making the business product. And like you said before we started hitting record, I found interesting when you said it, that a lot of companies get into corporate training way late in the game. If I could wave a magic wand, like I didn’t, we didn’t even do this until like more than. 60% through the current life of the business. Before we’re like, Hey, maybe we should document what we do and how we do things. And sometimes that starts kind of sloppy with like, well there’s a Google Doc here. There’s a note over here. There’s a slideshow presentation. Check out this YouTube video over here. It’s very disorganized. But yeah, I just want to pass it back to you on. Why you love it. It can sound like sort of a stodgy topic, but it’s actually really exciting when you think of the business as a product and you document it and the efficiency gains and the knowledge transfer and everything. Like what? What makes you excited about it?  Kurt Von Ahnen: See now you’re, you’re kind of incorporating there. There’s parts of me that I can’t separate. So while I’m very focused on e-learning and corporately, I loved being like the publications and training manager at Suzuki, motors of America. That was like a great job, right? Great title. But I couldn’t separate the marketing or the entrepreneur person from the education manager in that company. And so for me, I get really excited with corporate training because it’s. People, a lot of business owners in the corporate space, they see it as a necessary evil. They see it as an expense. They see it, you know, in, in the world of debits and credits. They only see it as the debit. Instead of recognizing that, corporate training can very much be a marketing tool that can drive performance. Ambition within your staff. Restore or build, corporate culture, right? So, so that you reduce your turnover. Uh, it can also be a really, really great marketing tool for the sales side of things. So if you’re a company that has a and I, and I might be going. I might be like fast forwarding us through content right now, but if you’re a pr, if you’re a production company that does consumer goods, you automatically have three verticals of courses that your company requires. You’re, you should have, uh, training so that people in the field can effectively sell your product to the consumer, right? So you make something that’s somewhat technical. You assume people in the field are familiar with it or they’re enthusiasts and they know how it works. What you really need is a features and benefits type course for them so they know how to sell the product. Then you need public facing courses where people buy the product and they can take a course that tells ’em how to properly use the product. And then you need a separate vertical of courses for all of the people that are in the, the backend, what we call fixed operations, what we call, you know, after sales in some companies, and that’s people that are in staff or in the field that would have to fix whatever that product is, if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. And a lot of times. The people that make these decisions, the people that are in the position high up in these companies, it’s taken them a long time and a lot of effort to get to where they’re at. And they, they deserve all the respect for getting there. But the thing is, is that they haven’t stayed crisp on all the other nuances of what business can do when they got there. And training is usually one of the last things that they consider on the budget, uh, items. ’cause they’re mostly concerned about how do they make more sales, how do they move more units? You know, how do they monitor, you know, the customer service lines? How do they, there’s, there’s all this business operations that seem to take that, that that urgent classification rather than the important classification. And if they focus on what’s important, instead of urgent training, kind of bubbles to the top. And if they trained everybody, all that other noise would quiet down.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you and I have a history of just being in like management and leadership positions. And one of the things that makes me so excited about it is like 99% of companies, when a new hire comes on board, their, their solution to corporate training is follow bob around, Bob, tell, tell this new hire everything, you know? And then, and then another new hire comes, and now Bob has to stop working. And be shadowed again, which is good. That’s part of training and mentoring and things like that, but that whole thing can get so much more efficient. And what if Bob quits? What if Bob goes to a competitor, you just lost Bob.  Kurt Von Ahnen: What if Bob opens up his trainer onboarding with this is the way they want us to do it, but this is the way we really do it. Chris Badgett: Yeah, even worse. Yeah. And that’s, that’s how you get into toxic c corporate culture, right?  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, absolutely. And, and so a lot of people think that maybe I’m a little too oversold on, on the whole training thing, but it really has become quite a passion point for me. I love to train, I love to teach, I love to help with curriculum development, so a lot of that is kind of just instilled, I guess. But when I see the actual benefits. Of corporate training when it’s used from a different perspective than necessary evil or bottom line on the budget thing, when I see it actually leveraged as an asset, that’s when I really see growth at the corporate level. Like I said, that change in internal culture is huge. You mentioned the stuff that you do with Lifter. I do the same thing with Ana Nomas. When I started my agency, I thought, well, anybody can have an agency, like, you know, everybody’s nephew knows how to make websites. So if I ever wanted to have an exit strategy from Manana, NOMAS, what would set it apart? What would make it different? Than any other agency. And we have a similar thing. We have a backend course in the back of Ana Nomas, and every time we add a new process to Ana Nomas, I do a screen share with one of our staffers. We create a quick lesson about it and we add it to a section in our course. That way, if I ever need to sell Ana Nomas, or if I get hit by a bus and someone in my family wants to sell money, Noma, they don’t have to learn how an agency works. They can just say, Hey, this agency’s turnkey, and it comes with the complete directions on how to run it right here.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a great point. And you mentioned earlier that some higher ups in bigger companies may see corporate training as an expense. I actually see it as the opposite. Like you, it is actually an asset.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: But in terms of company valuation, no matter what kind of company it is, uh, when somebody buys that, they’re not just buying whatever property is there. The staff that are working there, but they’re buying the process. It’s actually the most important thing that you’re selling as a company in many, many cases. It’s how you do what you do. And is that documented somewhere? Uh, that’s, that’s key. And e-learning comes in because e-learning implies structure. And it, you know, you can be flexible. Just get it in there somewhere. But if it’s spread all over, like massive Google Docs folders or spreadsheets on somebody’s computer and not here and there, it’s, it can get messy really quickly and not unified across a company, particularly a bigger one with multiple divisions. Kurt Von Ahnen: Well, and, and a big component of, of what you’re alluding to but haven’t said is expensive. Because each platform that some department head decided to use or incorporate or, you know, create an addendum to came probably with some kind of subscription expense. And so, for instance, when I worked at Ducati and did their training, there was three or four different e-learning platforms that were used, and then there were multiple. Physical external hard drives that were like backed up and kept secure on site. You know, we had an IT guy that, you know, you had to get a certain, a certain privilege to be able to access this sacred documentation. And at the end of the world, you know, that’s, that’s not the efficient way to run stuff. That’s not the affordable way to run things. When you have something, you know, like to throw the commercial in for Lifter right here. When you have something like Lifter that can consolidate all of that information and different types of media into something that’s structured it, it takes away the needs for all those other channels. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And then you throw in WordPress, which lifter needs as well. That’s a content management system with things like categories for organization. And, you know, lifter builds on that further in the e-learning context. But I think it’s sort of like, you know, if I could wave a magic wand, the moment a new company starts, they should build two websites. One for their marketing site or their business, and then another for their company. That’s internal training or corporate training and like start from day one that way. But it never happens that way. The training always comes like years and years and years later, right?  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, it’s a lot of times people hesitate in a new startup or a younger company, they hesitate for the documentation part because they assume everything’s gonna change. They assume, we’re constantly gonna change, we’re constantly gonna evolve. You know, if, if we stay still, then we’re going backwards. We gotta keep moving forward. And those are great catchy sayings. But at the end of the day, if you don’t, you know, if you don’t take a bite out of it and start. Really starting to track the things that you’re doing. It can spool outta control pretty quickly.  Chris Badgett: It just popped in my head too. I wanna mention, like, I wanna fight against this thing that, like corporate training is an expense. ’cause it’s not. So for example, uh, let’s say you, you bring in an outside sales expert that teaches sales to your sales team. All you have to do is be like, Hey, if it’s all with you, I’m gonna film this training session. So that we can review it later and the team can review it, and then that means every year you don’t have to hire the same sales trainer to come in or a different one. Like you’re, you’re, you’re creating an asset and you’re capturing value. And organizations are messy because people come in and out or go to a competitor or things happen in life. So it’s, it’s like curating value and like the wisdom. Because we call it, you know, like in software or any kind of company really, there’s something called the guardian of the black box. The black box, which often for a startup is the founder. Everything’s in their head. So they need to get it out of the black box and get it public and like known, like how does this thing work? How do, how do we do this? How do we sell this? How do we make this, how do we do the back office operations? Like, what is it? It’s not always just, well just go ask the founder or the manager or whatever.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah, and I think it’s important to recognize that when we start talking about this topic, we’re not just saying, oh, create a course, but everything in one course and everybody gets access to it. A lot of people at the corporate level have different, tiers of information they wanna share with people, and you’re able to do that through, you know, most learning management systems. You’re, you’re, you know, when it comes to corporate training, you could say. Directors get, you know, these courses and managers get these courses and clerks get these courses. So you can be super, super specific and distribute the training in a way that makes sense for your business.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, and even tools like LifterLMS groups can help with that.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh yeah.  Chris Badgett: And, and in terms of like, oh, well this is. This is for like, if you have multiple franchises with locations and each location is a new group and so on. There’s so many different ways to organize it and make sure you control the access the way you wanna, the way you want to control it. Why, what, anything else about why you think WordPress is a great fit? ’cause I gotta, like in the early days when we launched Lifter. It’s predominantly the creator economy, like the YouTuber, the coach, the subject matter expert. These were our first customers, but then Kurt showed up in his office cubicle interested in like getting really excited. Tell us more about that moment of like, why WordPress, why LifterLMS. 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Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Kurt Von Ahnen: Well this is probably the number one target channel for our agency Mana No Mas. And it’s because of my experience at the corporate level. These corporate companies that I worked at, where I was in charge of the learning programs, the learning, you know, learning departments, their budgets were, I mean, for me. I started to get used to the numbers, but for a person outside of corporate training, the numbers seem huge. So when, when you look at, you know, hey, we’ve got this commercial product that you know, we need to train. 2,500 people on, and, and you think, okay, and they build that up. These corporations, again, they made these decisions maybe 8, 12, 15 years ago, and they, they made a decision that said, we’re gonna use, you know, this type of software and this type of platform, and this is, you know, how we’re gonna afford this, right? How we’re gonna, we’re gonna budget for this. What a lot of people don’t recognize is these companies are literally budgeting. A quarter million dollars a year to a half a million dollars a year to run these e-learning websites. And so part of my enthusiasm when, when Chris met me in the office hours was, here I am this guy who’s authorizing $400,000 a year for hosting and maintenance of a learning management system for a corporation. And I’m sitting there thinking to myself. I can host a website in WordPress, you know, super cheap. But for corporate enterprise purposes, let’s say even if I paid three grand a year for the hosting, that’s $3,000. And then I was looking at the price of LifterLMS and a couple of CRM tools and a couple of things I’d like to plug in. And now let’s say I spend another. $2,000 on software for the year, let’s just say that, right? So maybe I’m at $5,000 for the year for the software, the hosting, and now it’s just my time that, that it’s gonna go into like the, the maintenance side of it. And, uh, I really started to look at it as an opportunity. And not that I’m gonna take $5,000 in costs and, you know, a couple hundred hour, couple hundred hours of my life every year and sell that to a company for $400,000. That’s, that’s not, that’s not the picture that was in my head. The picture that was in my head, Chris, was we can create. E-learning now in WordPress with Lifter that looks better, feels better, functions better, can play the same legacy content that some of these companies insist on keeping and using, which I fully understand. And we can go from three to $500,000 a year on maintenance and hosting to, I can run that as an agency for a company now. 60, 70, $80,000 a year. Our margins are strong, our product is superior, and the company is, you know, saving 65 to 80% of their e-learning costs by using us. So that’s how I got excited. So, so when I started to plan and exit from the corporate world and do my own agency, I was like, there’s a whole world of, of corporate clients. That are paying for purpose-built SCORM websites, or they’re in Learn Upon, or Bridge or Blackboard or something, but those e-learning sites that they’re paying the retail plus dollars for, they don’t have all the features that a WordPress CMS delivers with an LMS embedded in it. And so we’re able to give them something much, much better and more fulfilling. For less of the investment. And it’s, it’s kind of a backwards thought for a lot of the people that run the businesses. So a lot, it’s too good to be true kind of thing. It’s, it’s almost a hard sell. It’s  Chris Badgett: too cheap.  Kurt Von Ahnen: But once we get them and we treat them well, they’ll never leave. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And the cool thing about Mana No mas too, like I know the WordPress freelancers and agencies out there listening are like, they’re getting excited because they’ll be like. I love life coaches as an example, but that’s an example of a subject matter expert with a particular expertise. There’s only so much a life coach would be willing to pay for an LMS website. Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: But if you start, if you do it for a corporate client, it’s just, it’s much higher value to their business impact and to their. Value generation and asset protection and stuff like that. It’s a different game altogether, but they’re not just hiring you to put the best hosting theme, WordPress plugins together. Manano Nomas also has like the knowhow of how corporate training works and where the friction points are. And  Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, because  Chris Badgett: you, you, I know you end up not just building a website, but actually. Kind of coaching your clients through the transformation of installing, uh, effective corporate training in the organization. Not to mention the fact that it’s not just getting the technology implemented and, and the business buy-in, but you also know how to structure e-learning content ’cause you’re a trainer. So  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: You know how to just help remove all that friction and coach them to success.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. It’s a thank you, that’s flattering. But yeah, having some curriculum development expertise where you can come in and, and you can do a needs assessment with them and based on their, based on their vertical for industry, you know, is it an industry that has an appetite for long form training, which some still do, that’s great, but you know, hey, do we take this existing legacy content and break it down into, you know, more of a micro learning situation where we really. Take advantage of some of that learner psychology. We know about, you know, about dopamine hits and, and little short wins and, and making things happen. Do we gamify it? Do we give people, you know, badges and prizes for accomplishing certain things? You see corporate training’s completely different than course creator. You know, marketplaces, if we think about corporate training, it’s all about course completion. It’s all about, you know, current certification in a certain job set and. The corporate training that they offered previously on those outdated websites with the old legacy content. It’s not entertaining. It’s not fun. There’s no dopamine hit, there’s no leaderboard, there’s no, there’s no engagement. It’s, you do it ’cause you need to do it. This needs to be done by Wednesday. Hey, if you don’t have this done by Wednesday, I can’t give you a check on Friday. Like that. That’s like corporate training has this like overlord sensation to it. You know where, where everyone kind of dreads it. But there’s a way to reinvest in corporate training. And, and again, this makes me sound overly hopeful. I think sometimes, but I still say it this way. People could reinvest in corporate training. Leverage the tools of WordPress on a platform like lifter, LMS, you, you can gamify it, you can make it fun. You can create micro learning. And then with corporate training, what’s really, really important is a lot of corporate training needs involve blended learning, which means you want to have a, a strategy to reduce costs and, and cost corporately refer to like travel, hotel per diem, you know, all that stuff, right? And so, you want to create content that gives them as much effective theory online as possible. And then once they complete and certify themselves in the theory side of it online, then you bring them in for a consolidated, succinct in-person practicum where they demonstrate whatever those skills need to be. So a perfect example of that is the work I did at Ducati. When I worked at Ducati. Their training was contract based and it was kind of scattered. It was, they did like local in-person trainings. Uh, and it was like a two week session for technicians to get certified as, as a motorcycle technician. What, what I did in my first year at Ducati was I took all the theory from that course. And I built a curriculum where the technicians could certify themselves for theory online. First, they had to successfully complete and test out of all the online training first. Then they came to a one week practicum course where we refreshed the training, reviewed some high points of the training, just to make sure everybody was on the same page. Then we put him in a workshop and we said, okay, each technician gets an opportunity to display the skills. They learned through the online training and once we could witness that, they actually could, you know, perform the skillset, we could certify them so they could work on customers motorcycles. Corporately, the benefit was we cut the training budget in half from 2013 to 2014. We cut the budget in half, but we certified twice as many technicians. So when you look at that from a corporate expenditure standpoint, that is not. That is not an expensive training. That is an asset of training.  Chris Badgett: I love that. And one other note on the asset thing is sometimes when you get really good at corporate training, you actually create a new product that you can sell. Like you would know better than me, but. For example, a lot of people have studied the Toyota production system, which is a, uh, it’s like how Toyota does what they do. Their stuff is so good that made Toyota so effective that it became stuff that other companies would invest in. I don’t know who wrote the book on it, or if Toyota actually sold it or licensed it or whatever, but. You can’t, your corporate training can be so awesome in how you train your salespeople that you can just train. You can then sell that training to other people who have salespeople, which is  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kurt Von Ahnen: In the franchise space, that’s super, super common where the, the main company will make, like addendum training, right. So like different specialty training, and then they’ll sell that to their franchisees as upgrades. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. See, it’s an asset. You, you know it, I know it. We’re trying to get every, everybody to know it. The reality is, if you really think about it, every company in the world is an education company. They just, a lot of ’em don’t realize it. So once you realize that it’s, it’s really mind blowing when you think about it. Kurt Von Ahnen: I was gonna say, I actually do a local talk here for entrepreneurs about why every company needs to have a learning management system.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Just onboarding people. If I hire a new contractor to come into Ana Nomas to help me with social media or SEO or you know, helping build things in zip wp, I literally just send them to a section of our course and say, this is what I hired you for. You know, I’m gonna pay you for the time to take this section of training, but then you have everything you need to perform the task I hired you for.  Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah. That’s that’s awesome. Tell, tell us about, the kind of corporate training clients that you work with at your agency. Like, who’s a good fit and what do you offer and how should they get in touch with you? Kurt Von Ahnen: Do, do you want the secret mojo on, on how to work through the nonsense or do you, do you wanna just know what I do?  Chris Badgett: Uh, all of it.  Kurt Von Ahnen: So usually when you work with corporate, the first person you talk to is not the person that you want to talk to. Someone reached out to you, or your marketing landed in somebody’s mailbox and, and it, and it got the actual, you know, web form filled out or the lead came in somehow. So when you work with corporate clients, it’s super important that before you start doing like. Needs assessments and proposals and, and really getting wrapped up in what this project could look like. You gotta make sure that you have the actual stakeholders within your circle of communication. So sometimes it’s harder than it seems. Uh, but, uh, Chris will tell you I’m a pretty direct communicator, so, uh, I just ask people, I just flat out ask people. I have a really good story that maybe I’ll share sometime about how I landed the actual position at Ducati. It’s pretty funny ’cause I basically just told the whole room of people, I said, I’m pretty sure whoever makes the decision isn’t in this room right now. So we can have a conversation later. And thank goodness I said that ’cause it worked out perfect. Working with corporate clients, you gotta find the stakeholders first. You have to, you have to find them, identify them, and then make sure that you have their attention or their buy-in. Like I said, corporately, the people that really make the decisions, the people that really, you know, draw out the spreadsheets and the budgets for their different divisions or departments, typically they’ve been in the game for a bit. They, they, they’re, they’re tired. They’re, they’re just trying, they’re not really looking for changes, right. We, this is the way we do it. ’cause this is the way we’ve always did it. Right. So it’s, you, you’re trying to overcome that. And I’ll be honest with you, Chris, if I feel that there’s. Too much of an obstacle there, or this has taken too much of my personal energy to educate them on why this is a great move for their business. I just move on to the next lead. You know, I, I don’t try to convert people that aren’t really looking to be converted. I want people that very willingly are looking forward to the breath of fresh air that we give their company. So. Working with corporate clients, the main thing is finding the right person inside the company. And then the next step, Chris, is something I think that most free, most freelancers. Bail and, and totally dismiss it, but I think a lot of agencies do too. And that is, you gotta sell discovery. You, you, it’s not like you’re gonna talk to some dude for 30 or 45 minutes and then know what the project’s gonna be. You gotta,  Chris Badgett: well, you don’t instantly know like, okay, well you need exactly this corporate training after this kind of. Implementation after a quick conversation.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I mean, you can, you can dream build with somebody pretty quickly, but when it comes to, Hey, what’s the scope of work actually gonna look like? I think the only way to really tackle that is through paid discovery and where you say, Hey, I’m gonna need 4,000, 5,000, $8,000, whatever you. Think you can, you can muster, but, and you have to come up with work that justifies the expense, obviously. But you are going to interview multiple stakeholders within the corporation, depending on the size of the corporation, because marketing’s gonna want one thing. Sales is gonna want something different. Uh, operations is gonna be like a whole different channel and world to talk to. And then there’s customer service and then of course hr. And so you’re gonna have to get information. From all of those stakeholders as leaders. And you gotta remember that in a lot of corporate frameworks, it really does come down to almost like design by committee, which is uh, uh. That’s like a phrase that most people hate. But the trick to this is out of all those people that you interview, out of all those people that you have in the stakeholder circle, you have to figure out how do you make yourself the hub? How do you become the project manager where you’re actually in charge of what’s happening on the project, and they’re just kind of along for the information. They’re not really making decisions. You’re informing them and you’re telling ’em that you’re the expert in the space. And then if you can make that happen. It’s gonna be a lot smoother sailing for you. If you don’t do proper discovery and you let somebody else, or, or two or three other voices percolate to the top, you’ve got a disaster on your hands and you’re probably gonna get sued at the end. Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I like what you’re saying too, like about the mindset of . Group think isn’t always a bad thing.  Chris Badgett: Like you need to just, you need to get inside like what all these different stakeholders want. ’cause you’re not just building a website, you’re like working within an organization and you need to meet their needs. And all the stakeholders need to be left better off than how you found them. And that requires a discovery process. You can’t just like. Kind of hold your finger up in the air and guess what would be perfect for this company?  Kurt Von Ahnen: It’s weird because I know that there’s people that’ll will watch this. I know that there’s people that, that will listen to what we’re saying and they’ll be like, oh, that’s silly. I’m just gonna need these three plugins. I’m gonna slap those in, and then I’m gonna show them a sample course, and then they can build what they want to fill in the gaps for their courses. And from a freelancer perspective. That might work for a course creator or that might work for a very small startup or something like that. But if you want to get into the, into the real corporate training space where you’re dealing with department heads and operational managers in, in multiple locations and, and things like that, like imagine trying to sell Audi of America. A new e-learning platform. I worked at a bunch of different Audi training centers and I know 35 of the people that, that work there and train people. Like you need to have a relationship with those people so that you can do the needs assessment. You can come up with a plan of attack and a strategy, and then you need to relay it to them to get their buy-in where you let them know that, Hey, I’ve heard you. I know what you’re asking for, but this is our answer to that and this is how we’re gonna proceed. Then you execute and you execute well. You execute on budget, and you execute on time, and you deliver on time and under budget. And then the project has a chance to land and expand to steal one of Chris’s favorite phrases. That’s that’s one of my skill sets by the way. I land and expand. Hey, what’s next?  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, if somebody out there is running a business, whether it’s small, medium, or large. They understand the value of corporate training and they want some help, and they want to leverage the power customizability and affordability of WordPress Lifter and, and work with a leader in the space and an innovator, and a consultant, and an implementer in the space like you and your agency. What should they do from here? How should they connect with you?  Kurt Von Ahnen: Our website is manana Nomas, uh, so that’s like tomorrow no more, right? But manana nomas.com. Uh, I’m also the only Kurt Van Onan on LinkedIn. If you’d rather connect on LinkedIn and then see what other things are linked to or who’s in my circles there. If you wanna research me more before you contact me, that’s fine. And then anything on social media is Ano Nomas or Kurt Van, and I’m super easy to find and connect with.  Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming back on the show and thank you for bringing the corporate training use case to LifterLMS. ’cause I don’t know if I’ve ever said it directly, like you were the first one I saw where like, oh, this is somebody in this use case who’s here. Interested, excited, passionate, just trying to help. People and businesses is, it’s awesome. So thank you for, for joining us on the Journey.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, you’re, you’re very welcome. And, and just to give people a little sense of reassurance about what Chris is saying about the corporate training thing, the free core Lifter plugin is usually sufficient to get corporate training launched. ’cause you’re not selling the training, you’re delegating the training to staff. So you don’t need the, the payment gateways and some of the marketing tools.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that’s the key with corporate training and SOPs, standard operating procedures and things like that is the key is just a start. So a good content management system and learning management system together gives you everything you need  Kurt Von Ahnen: and we can always scale later.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Awesome, Kurt. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. We’ll have to do this again. In fact, we will likely see you in the next episode. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. 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