Thread by @alexhillman

From 2012-2015, @amyhoy and I ran our business bootstrapping course called 30x500 as a LIVE two-day bootcamp event...totally online.

This course was very different from most online courses in a lot of important ways. Lemme talk about them. (1)

First, lets talk about the setting.

Rather than live streaming video (a technical hurdle at the time, but also, a risk of downtime that could derail the class), we ran everything in a chat room. Campfire from @37signals specifically.

We spent 2 days from 10am-5pm Eastern time in that chat room.

We did NOT register students in the campfire account (that was a PITA) so we just gave a unique guest link to join, and promised exported chat transcripts at the end of the class.

We limited seating to 30 students (sometimes a couple of returning alumni would lurk quietly, but generally, we held strict to that rule). That is definitely the MAX for a productive chat conversation, no matter how good you are at facilitating. More on facilitation later.

We had a tight itinerary for each day. Each hour was planned down to the 10-15 minute interval, almost like a conference schedule.

Students did NOT see that schedule other than knowing when breaks would be. We didn’t want people skipping anything cuz they “thought they knew it”

If you’ve ever been to a live conference though, you know that the schedule ALWAYS slips. Always always always. Somebody talks long, or starts late, or...

So how did we keep the course on schedule and pace?

Enter our first real innovation...

Pre-recorded video lessons, picture in picture talking head over keynote slides.

Pre-recorded meant tight control. It meant editing. It meant we’d never MISS something important. It meant the lesson was always good, even if Amy or I was having an “off day” cuz that happens.

It also meant that we could conserve energy. Teaching lessons takes a lot of energy, but the CORE was actually live practice and teacher coaching. That part *must* be live.

So pre-recording the lessons also made us more effective when it came time for live feedback and coaching.

Now, you might be wondering, “how did we get everyone to watch the videos at the same time? what cool app does that?”

Well....our approach was decidedly low tech in the grand scheme of things.

We literally would say “okay everybody, the next lesson focuses on X. it’s about 12 minutes. here’s the link. once you open the link, press play. when you’re done watching, come back to the chat room and say “I’m done.”

Very, very low tech.

So that was how we delivered around 5 hours of lecture across 2 days of class.

- Pre-recorded videos
- Low-tech synchronization

The benefits were
- Consistent, high quality lessons
- Preserved teacher energy
- Almost zero ways for tech to break

(nothing is more distracting to the class AND the teacher than one person's sound cutting out and then needing to troubleshoot live, or say "sorry bud" to someone who paid a couple thousand dollars to be there)

Okay so that’s how we did LESSONS, and TBH I’ve never seen or heard of anybody else doing an online class this way before or since.

But lessons were only one third of the course contents. We also had interactive, timed exercises, and live coaching. So lets talk about that.

After each lesson, our students would be given a chance to try their hand at the thing they just learned.

In 30x500, that includes our customer research technique (Sales Safari), a copywriting framework that allows novice writers to create very persusive sales copy, etc.

Everything we teach is a process. There are underlying ideas, but the ideas are learned by DOING a thing a certain way. So we focus on the doing. Which means doing it in class, with safety and support designed right into the exercise.

All exercises were timeboxed. No “do it forever until you hope it works” but instead “do it for this long, and then we look at the results together.”

This was very intentional.

Students were never working on their own for more than 15 mins. Sometimes as little as 5-10.

These exercises were direct riffs on the lesson they had just watched and BONUS since the lesson was a pre-recorded video, THEY COULD JUST GO BACK AND CHECK THE VIDEO IF THEY MISSED SOMETHING THE FIRST TIME.

Personalized instant replay for every student built right in.

So the students would do the step-by-step assignment to the best of their ability in that time.

We made it clear: you won’t be great at anything the first time. This is learning how to do it, but also, learning how to PRACTICE.

We treated biz skills like piano lessons.

Over 2 days, there were roughly 10-12 exercises (I genuinely can’t remember its been a few years).

Usually, after an exercise, we'd take a 10-15 minute break too. This let people to take extra time if they needed on the exercise, OR to just take a break from their screen.

Also, the exercises - like the lessons - stacked on each other.

Everything we teach is interconnected, so the results of early lessons become the inputs for later lessons.

Across the exercises, students actually got to practice the whole series of skills they were learning.

After each exercise came one my favorite parts:

We’d ask the chat room to answer: “How did that feel?”

Surprise! Almost nobody thought they knocked it out of the park.

Sometimes people would say “harder than I expected.”

Often, “I have no idea if I did that right.”

Again, this is by design.

First, students got a chance to see THEY WERE NOT ALONE IN THEIR STRUGGLE with the new skills. Sure some might pick it up faster than others, but nobody was an instant master.

WHOOPS @amyhoy reminded me that I missed a step.

Before most (but not all) new lessons, we actually gave them a special mini-exercise. A chance to try out the skill *before* they learned it.

Sounds weird, right? Why force students to do a thing you know they don’t know how to do?

Well...we added this specifically because we found that a lot of student would only casually pay attention to the lesson if they thought they already “knew what it was about.”

So Amy had this brilliant idea to do a micro challenge BEFORE the lesson, so they’d fail (safely!) and realize “oh shit, this is harder than I thought, I really need to pay attention.”

This was a game changer for our student results, and something that’s still in 30x500 today.

So the cycle was this:

- Micro challenge to show them what they were about to learn and create a “gap” for the spark of new knowledge
- Lesson, to show them how to do the thing they just sucked at
- Full challenge, to practice what they just learned

Again, this cycle was carefully designed after watching hundreds of students struggle and finally realize that they weren’t *really* paying attention because they didn’t think they had to try that hard.

The curse of teaching smart people is real, frineds.

There’s one last step in the “cycle” of each challenge/exercise/challenge loop.

If you’re new at something, and probably not great at it, how do you learn what you need to improve?

🔥 🔥 Enter: the 30x500 Interactive Hot Seat. 🔥🔥

After every exercise, we’d ask for 2 students to volunteer to show their work to the class. Literally paste it into the chat room.

Then we’d ask the class:

“How do YOU think they did?”

Before we gave our feedback, we asked students to analyze the work themselves.

But as you likely have experienced yourself, analyzing your OWN work is very, very, very difficult. If you’re a beginner, forget it. You’re basically a walking blind spot.

But in our chat room classroom, our students got to practice analyzing *the work of a peer at their level*

This often came with a big confidence boost for the students doing the analyzing (the 28 NOT in the hot seat).

We specifically encouraged them to compare their OWN notes to the people in the hot seat. “What did you get that’s the same? What’d you get that’s different?”

In a sneaky way, even though being in the hot seat meant you were about to get 1-1 coaching from us, the teachers, it actually was MORE valuable to be among the other 29 watching the process.

I’ll add, that this was all done in a VERY supportive way. No shaming or meanness.

After students would talk about what they noticed in their compare/contrast, then we’d jump in as the experts.

We’d show them OUR results from having done the exact same exercise they did. “This is what it looks like when you practice.”

And again, we’d invite them to compare/contrast their work to ours (the teachers!). What did they get? What did they miss?

Then, as teachers, we could point out what WE see that they might have missed or done incorrectly. Another layer of learning how to analyze.

At the end of the 🔥 hot seat 🔥 we’d give each of the two students who volunteered their work a few specific notes.

- Here’s what you did really well. Keep that up!
- Here’s what you need to work on. Here are some tips for how to improve next time.

Then to all, any questions?

So the entire learning cycles was:

- Mini-challenge exercise
- Video lesson
- Actual challenge
- Hot seat critique and feedback
- Questions and discussions

Each of these segments was 5-15 mins long. We moved fast, but gave very generous breaks.

A few other things that helped glue everything together:

1 - A shared note-taking document. (We used Hackpad at the time, which got rolled into Dropbox Paper).

This let students to optionally collaborate on taking notes from lessons, stash advice from the chat room, etc.

2 - we had a second Hackpad document specifically for questions.

We’d answer quick “blocking” questions in the chat room, but often, people would want to ask questions that would be answered in later lessons, or weren’t critical to the core course.

So throughout the day, students would drop their non-blocking questions into a document, and then we’d do a 1-hour-ish blitz Q&A answering the questions directly in the chat room.

I think that’s most of it.

Beyond the 2 day bootcamp, we eventually offered an optional “bonus Q&A” as a paid upgrade, and scheduled it 4 weeks later for questions that people had after they started working with their new skills.

Later, we added an additional 6-8 week “exercise program” that gave students an ongoing venue to practice and get feedback while working alongside other students.

A lot of this HIGH LEVEL learning design was the brilliance of @amyhoy channeling our hero Kathy Sierra.

Most of my greatest contributions contributions was designing all of the interactive exercises. I was also the MC for the live event, keeping us on-time and on track.

Again, I’ve never seen or heard of anybody do anything quite like this.

Very curious if anybody else has. Would love love love to swap notes.

Our current version of 30x500 (which is OPEN for enrollment rn!) is 100% derived from this process. The “live event” component is missing, which comes with trade offs.

But we managed to recreate the rest - including the hot seat experience - in an async, self guided format.

We still have a very active chat room component too - still strongly focused on students sharing work and helping each other.

But now, since we have hundreds of students (I think 1000+ in our Slack) at various levels, experienced students can actually HELP newbies!

Someone asked if either of us had ever done this solo.

The answer is no. Honestly, even if Amy was at 100% health and/or I had every single strength she brings to the table as a teacher and coach, 2 days would likely kill either of us.

*maybe* doable if not back to back days.

But for the first time ever, I am getting to experiment with this tomorrow!

Not only am I teaching “solo” I’m doing it live, in a room, with the actual students.

It’s much smaller scale - just ONE specific section of the full course (Pain-Dream-Fix copywriting)

It’s also the first time we’re ever teaching a piece of 30x500 directly into a well known and influential coporation. I’m NDA’d so I can’t say who, but I can say you know their name and depending on your industry, you use their tools.

This isn’t something we’re seeking out, they came to us.

I don’t want or need to spend my days doing corporate training.

But I am VERY excited to be revisiting this LIVE format and working hands on with these students tomorrow.

Damn, I did not start out planning for that to be a zillion tweet thread.

Uh, any questions? 😅

Note from @p_millerd points out that he thinks of most “video lectures” as a form of entertainment.

This perfectly describes the problem we had to overcome with mini-challenges before our video lessons! People would sit back, listen and nod, but weren’t really in learning mode.

If you’re deeply interested in creating learning experiences that actually work for learners, get yourself a copy of Kathy Sierra’s “Badass” and read it cover to cover a few times.

We ran this bootcamp 4-5x a year for a little over 3 years. After the first two, I think, we sold out every single one (30x students).

That meant we could MAX teach 120-150 students per year.

The latest version now serves around around 3x as many students per year and growing!

But the version we run now could NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER exist if we didn’t run the bootcamp that I described in this thread at least 7-8 times.

Every version we learned new things about out students, why they struggled, and how to better help them succeed.

It went well.