Thread by @p_millerd

1/ 🧵This is the story of how I became an accidental course creator and it starts in 2015 with a course named "Crushing Your Resume"

This is the story of many different attempts at online courses and all the fun along the way 👇

2/ By 2015, I had helped hundreds of people with resumes and was very good at it. Yet after helping a friend during an intense 3 hour session, I realized I was just repeating myself over and over. I wanted to retire from resume help but still wanted to be able to help people.

3/ I decided I would create an online course. I was pretty excited by the opportunity to put this on Udemy and see what would happen. I initially put it up as a paid course (and gave free coupons to anyone that asked).

I'll get to whether I made money in a second.

4/ At this point I had launched a side gig, as a "career coach" under the "Careers with Paul" umbrella. To create the course I did what I did best, make powerpoint slides.

Here are slides from the original deck

5/ Its funny looking back at this but I was clearly on to something. I remember being really energized. I even bought a snowball mic.

I recorded the videos couldnt install anything other than powerpoint on my work computer so I paid a college student I knew to edit the videos

6/ I spent an absurd amount of time getting over some very basic hurdles that I always try to remember when helping others get started. The basics can take sooooo many hourse when you just start.

7/ My goal was not to make money. It was to give away to friends who asked me for help so I could reject them nicely.

Yet I thought maybe I could make $ on Udemy. After several months it was clear I wasn't going to become rich.

I gave up ever making money on courses.

8/ I experimented again in 2018 with trying to upgrade the course and sell it on Udemy. I even hired a designer to upgrade slides.

I tried to sell it again but eventually realized Udemy was too crowded - a race to the bottom.

I made the course free with no expectations...

9/ However, the biggest insight from this period was what happened when I made the course free. I reached a CRAZY amount of people from 94 Countries?!

Something was brewing for online learning ....

10/ Also in 2018, about 6 months into self-employment/freelancing I decided to shift away from consulting work and write more about what I was really excited about, adapting to the future of work. Inspired by Seth Godins altMBA, I decided to challenge myself with a course.

11/ I decided to create a landing page and create an outline to see if people to sign up. I knew I could create the content and initial signups would give me the boost to create it at a high level.

I was doing the Zoom stack before it was cool.
think-boundless.com/solopreneur-sh…

12/ I ended up getting 8 people to join which was awesome. I didn't yet have any other models to measure against against except altMBA but it seemed like something I wanted to try again

The depth of the conversations & connections were amazing and it inspired me to keep going

13/ This broad interest globally piqued my interest and when I ended up in 2018 in Taiwan without any work (because I couldn't land any remote gigs - pre-covid lol) I decided to make another attempt at an online course through @teachable (which I had been following since Fedora)

14/ I had been coaching an undergrad consulting group for 4 years and had struggled to teach them the consulting skills I was using every day at BCG. Over time and many failures I stumbled upon ways of teaching them that seemed to help

15/ I also tested this at a company for a freelance project at a software company, helping to build their entry level consulting training program.

So now I had proof of teaching beginning through hands-on projects and one-week corporate training.

Corporate Paul for you

16/ The next thing I did was to create an online-friendly deck to test with multiple business friends in free online workshops. I didn't think the course would turn into anything but at minimum might be cool thing to give to people

Early "Ninja Problem Solving" branding

17/ Once I ended up in Taiwan without any work and after two months of wandering and reading in parks I decided to buy a @teachable subscription and start creating. I decided to pivot away from the ninja and call it "strategy toolkit"

Here is V1 of my intro video

18/ I built the course and I thought it was pretty good. I launched it at $99 and sold....4 copies in December.

Still pretty cool to make $389 when I didn't make any money and it was only costing $1000 to live in Taiwan.

In the first four months I sold five paid copies

19/ In this period I flew home from Taiwan for Christmas, ended up feeling like I had no idea what I was going to do for money in the future but had committed to joining friends in Bali in January. I ended up flying to Bali in January and thats when magic started happening

20/ While there I met @JayTdike who was a jack of all trades digital freelancer (though happily retired crushing his woodworking business now).

He was like "holy crap this is amazing, you just don't know how to market it!"

Oh.

21/ In January and February I wrote like a crazy person and published a whole bunch of articles about what I knew and moved them from Boundless to a new domain strategyu.co I started getting traffic immediately from the original articles on Boundless.

22/ It never occurred to me that I neded to give away lots of free content first to get people to buy my course, but I now am a lot smarter.

I started sharing stuff with a broader audience. Shoutout to a nice @radreadsco newsletter bump in jun 2020.

23/ By mid 2019 I had a first stretch of consistent sales and me realizing "oh crap I might be on to something"

But still thinking....this could disappear any minute.

24/ In Summer 2019 I experimented with two live cohort models and they went pretty well with 5-7 people in each one. One challenge was most people wanted 1-on-1 access to my coaching and the content didn't align itself with much energy around connecting with others

25/ So I shifted the course to a two tiered self-paced + self-paced + coaching course with weekly challenging assignments.

An automated 4-week email sequence and suggested schedule boosted my completion rates and led to happier students.

26/ One of the lessons from this was that people wanted the course to be harder. By introducing challenging assignments each week and raising pricing I attracted better customers who completed the course at higher rates or hired me for follow on presentation coaching work.

27/ One thing to note is that from the beginning I always had a "gift option." At first it said "click this and you get it for free" - 0% completion rate so I bailed on that.

I now use a gift exercise inspired by @andrewjtaggart & Charles Eisenstein

28/ This course was not the one I needed to build. I had still wanted to do V2.0 of Solopreneur Shift so in August/Sept 2019 I decided to announce a "build in public" to launch in October

If its not clear, I really like building not selling these things

https://twitter.com/p_millerd/status/1163671244903895040?s=20

29/ I did a writeup of the whole process of this for Podia so I won't rehash it. Long story short is I more or less broke even and felt good about creating something I felt like I had to create.

podia.com/articles/journ…

30/ My Reinvent Cohort was about 25-30 people from around the world (we had to run two time zones). It was the most energizing course experience I've ever had. Some people had major "shifts" which they had committed to and that was exciting.

31/ I had intended to run this again in 2020 but I ended up dealing with some health issues. I ran a pay-what-feels-right lightweight gift version and I've realized the only model for this course is high-touch cohort based. Thats where the real value is for students.

32/ During 2020 though my "Think Like A Strategy Consultant" course @strategyskills started taking off with the new self-paced or +coaching model during the pandemic. It seems a lot of people at home wanted to level up at work.

33/ The big takeaways from all this are many.

👉 White label platforms were the big opportunity. It enabled people to go directly to the audience that mattered. Udemy only worked for some people on some topics and will be hard to "hack" again. Scale is too big

34/ 👉 I never took online courses seriously until 2019 when I read @fortelabs STEVEs article recommended to me in that same Bali trip by @jonnym1ller - it was mind blowing how big Tiago was thinking. It aligned with my thinking but I wasn't acting like it
fortelabs.co/blog/the-futur…

35/ 👉 This is repeated by many people but Passive income only kind of exists. If you don't update and listen to customers and be responsive, eventually your course will probably fade away. Luckily this is something I like teaching.

36/ 👉Not ever course will easily make $ @ryanckulp has a formula to quickly test this
1. quality paradox (does a customer benefit from having peers?)
2. polymath dilemma (is the skill gap sufficiently abstract?)
3. status flex (does it increase prestige?)
ryanckulp.com/anatomy-of-ref…

37/ 👉I still think its damn early for online courses and I hope I am embarassed by all these courses five years from now. It's also damn exciting. Thinking about replicating the 3-4 inspiring teachers I had in 18 years of school 😲

38/ @david_perell in addition to Tiago has also been pushing the collective imagination for what's possible. I wish I had his 20's energy to devote more to the conversation :-)

https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1274127231241949184?s=20

39/ If you're scrolling all the way down just hunting for this damn resume course, here it is. It's 5 years old but I think its still quite impactful and easy if you take it serious
reinvent.think-boundless.com/nail-your-stor…

40/ If you want to check out the consulting skills course:

👉 @strategyskills
👉 strategyu.co/free-lessons
👉 learn.strategyu.co

41/ And if you want to get started I use both @teachable and @podia both are good. If you want to help me out use these links:

Podia: podia.com/?via=paul-mill…
Teachable: mbsy.co/teachable/4011…

might be interested in this: @ankurnagpal @ScottAdamsSays @m_ashcroft

42/ The big takeaway from this is that course creation is now paying the bills for me to live and work from anywhere. Which is mind blowing. 2015 me could not have imagined. Post-udemy me even more so.

Really amazing whats happening!