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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.

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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.

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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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, 

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

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

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

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

He has a book called Failing Forward. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: when.

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

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

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

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

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

Kurt Von Ahnen: it takes time. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

That’s the most important thing. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

How to Deal with the Failed Online Course Business: You 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: No. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Badgett: And that’s awesome.

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: no. 

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

’cause you have other things to get going and 

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, 

Chris Badgett: pivot and test. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go ahead. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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:

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

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

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

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

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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 [email protected]. Kurt also works with LifterLMS directly. You’ve seen him on some of our live calls and office hours, masterminds. Today we’re gonna get into how to launch an online course quickly and get really specific, tell some stories around that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a good book. 

Chris Badgett: It is good. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. So yeah, I am. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know if you knew that. 

Chris Badgett: I didn’t know that. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: So I knew it was coming. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: wanna change anyway. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

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

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

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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.

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

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

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

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

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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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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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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According to Emily Middleton, the way she operates WP Course Guide is purposefully distinct from a standard agency or freelancer model since she bases her company on close, intimate connections with her clients.Her early exposure to entrepreneurship through her family and her long-standing relationship with LifterLMS, which provided her with a strong feeling of commu nity, trust, and mentoring from the start of her career, have had a significant impact on her approach. Emily also explains key LMS website-making strategies using WordPress.

As a result, she views each project as a part of a greater human tale rather than a straightforward technical assignment, treating clients as partners and frequently as friends, and engaging emotionally in their success.

She highlights the value of live collaboration, particularly via Zoom, stating that it enables her to work more quickly, prevent misunderstandings, and gain a deeper understanding of the tactical and emotional difficulties her customers are having. Emily sees her work as both a technical problem-solver and a soothing presence, and many of the individuals she assists come to her during stressful times when a website is faulty, a launch is failing, or a business choice feels overwhelming. Face-to-face communication allows her to pick up on tone, impatience, reluctance, or doubt, all of which might disclose deeper business issues that would not come out through email alone.

Emily also talks about how her work is greatly impacted by ADHD. Instead of viewing it as a drawback, she characterizes it as a strength that enables her to think fast, adjust rapidly, pick up on minute details, and maintain a high level of engagement when working with others.

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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. I’m joined by a special guest today. Her name is Emily Middleton. She’s from WP Course Guide. You can find [email protected]. Emily runs an agency. She specializes in a lot of LMS related work. She’s been around the block for about a decade, maybe more.

I don’t know. It’s been a long time. So there’s tons of experience here. One of the things that Emily does differently is how she runs her agency and how she works with clients. We’re gonna start with that. But first, welcome back on the show. Emily. 

Emily Middleton: Thank you for having me, Chris. I’m happy to be here.

Chris Badgett: Let’s start with WP Course Guide. I’ve always been impressed with how you work with clients. For example, we, Emily also does some work directly with LifterLMS and some of our. Live calls, like the Office Hours Mastermind that universe bundle and hire people get access to for a weekly office hours mastermind as well as our ask us anything calls, which happened weekly.

But one, one time we were getting together for a Zoom meeting and you were actually at one of your agency clients. Place, which was really interesting, and I’ve seen that before where you’d pop up on the radar and you’re like, hanging out with LifterLMS users and clients of WP Course Guide. Tell us your approach to working with people and how you’re, you perhaps approach it a little differently than other freelancers or agencies when they work with clients.

Emily Middleton: Thank you. That’s a really good question. I, think it’s a funny thing that. That I do, that’s bleeding my personality into my business and part of how I run things. I do business on a very personal level, and I think the way I was intro to business was on a very personal level, so my. Mother did some work with lifterLMSlong time ago, like accounting work and client management work when LifterLMS was an agency Right.

Doing code box stuff and then the LifterLMS product launch. My mom was around at the time and I think Chris, you might have found her on Hire my mom.com which is funny ’cause you hired my mom there. And there was a little bit of nepotism, but I feel like I’ve proved myself because I really embraced Lifter and you as a mentor helped me with like my entrepreneurial journey.

Growing up through LifterLMS was like a family to me. And my granddad who inspired me to be an entrepreneur in the first place was a family member. And having that sense of family in business from the beginning, as I was a kid, being influenced by my entrepreneurial grandfather who was bringing me in on his projects and his random apps and his ideas, integrating me however he could.

And then. Having this sort of freelancer culture with my mother as a peer who is like recommending work to me. And I remember that I started with LifterLMS on the LMS cast. So I would this podcast we’re on now, I would write the summaries and the tweets and all the kind of summative text that went along with the episode.

And that was like my integration was as a young person. I had that opportunity to engage with Lifter as a form of online education, but I was also educating myself at the same time. And there was a sense of familial nature because you were my mentor and my mom did some work with the business. And so I treat that family culture carrying forward into the clients I have today.

I friends with most of my clients. I just had a client die. The first client. Who’s ever died and it really struck me. I remember seeing the email and then falling apart in the car. I take all the work I do super personally, and that’s why you’ll find me popping up at clients’ houses, going out doing, cool stuff, partying whatever we do.

Building LMSs. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s important to remember the humans on the internet, behind the website, behind the companies, behind the support tech, support. A client may have goals and dreams and it’s like challenging the project you’re working on, but there’s still a human there and with emotions and hopes and dreams and all that stuff.

So you it’s like holistic medicine. You gotta treat the whole thing, not just one part. There’s lots of different ways to run a agency and it can be very transactional with like minimal communication, but. That’s not very holistic and, the way you do it adds a lot of the humanity back into the types of work we do online, which is part of what gets lost, which is part of what we try to do at LifterLMS in terms of how we build the software.

We’re trying to connect the humans, not just facilitate transactions and content delivery things like the community aspects of lifter or the coaching aspects of the software. And things like that. So that’s, super cool. The other thing you do, which I find super fascinating, and it’s the way I would wanna be treated as a client, I don’t want to just be treated as a client.

I wanna be treated as a collaborator or, and I don’t just want to delegate work to an agency or a freelancer. I want to collaborate with them. Because like I may have my expertise, you have yours, let’s mash ’em together and see what happens. And if all that happens is you sign a contract and then you ask for the content and then you deliver the website, there’s very little collaboration there.

So tell us about the way you like to collaborate. And I’ve also seen you do it at speed. A lot of freelancers and agencies don’t like to get on the phone or the Zoom with clients because. It can feel time consuming, but when you get on a Zoom with a client, you’re actually creating work product at the same time, working way faster than a bunch of emails back and forth and time delays.

So tell us about that. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah, I do a lot of work with clients on Zoom. I created this system somewhat out of necessity, and for me it works really well because I have a DHD. I struggle with reading things. I’m dyslexic and so when I’m hit with an email that’s multiple paragraphs, I honestly get overwhelmed.

And so I, if I’m gonna be handling emails, I might need someone to help me on my team, or I might need to take longer amounts of time to read it. So for me, it’s much faster to have a conversation over Zoom. I think you, as the audience members might get an impression. I talk and think like very quickly.

I’m just like, my mind’s all over the place. And I liked what you said about a holistic approach. That’s what I say in my business all the time, is that. We might be dealing with a problem, but that problem could be a symptom of a larger issue. And so when we’re on Zoom, when we’re communicating, we can sense more about what people are seeing, the confidence in their voice.

Maybe they’re frustrated about a certain issue. I can pick up more on tone. I can pick up more on what people are going through as a business challenge. I think a lot of business owners. Especially the ones who are stressed enough to hire someone to help them in the capacity. I often help people like a medical, like a firefighter or a coming in to be a medic on a website.

That’s often my role at projects and that can be really stressful when you’re like, when you need a firefighter to come help fix your WordPress website. You are probably stressed because something has blown up, or you wanna implement something for your business, you need to make something work. It can sometimes be stressful.

And so when we’re stressed, we often lock in on problems that might not be exactly the right solution. And when we communicate over Zoom, when we can get online, not only does it help me with my process of understanding and helping people and showing kind of the love that I have for my business, my clients, and the whole ecosystem that comes across.

But I can also get the light in the client’s eyes. Like we can figure out like what’s going on in the business? Like where are you struggling? Where are you successful? I have gotten so much help created for clients when in passing they make a sigh or a comment about, oh God, I gotta do all this marketing stuff now.

Or I am really dreading doing this. They just make like a passing comment about something and then that opens up a whole door where we can say like, why are you dreading this issue? What specifically about it are you stuck with? How long have you been stuck with this problem? And what support do you feel like if you could just press a magic button and have support in this area, what would that support look like?

We can ask questions like that if we’re live on, Zoom, and it, really makes like a friends and family kind of vibe, which is my, thing. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I totally get it. And let’s park for a second on a DHD. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: I think it’s actually since we’re talking so much about family here, my grandfather once said it takes all kinds to make a world, right?

And he was like a manager, executive guy running a mill. But he that, that comment always stuck with me. So when you think about. There, there’s actually a ton of people that have a DHD. It’s very common and if you don’t have a DHD it may feel like different or uncomfortable to work with somebody with A DHD as an example.

But with everything as in life, it’s a double-edged sword. There’s also strengths to it. So one of the things I’ve noticed with working with you is you’re super. Fast and you’re very in the present moment, right? Which is super powerful. So we could be having a conversation, I could have a conversation with you while another part of your brain is like working on some project that we’re working on together.

And then this other thing comes up and you’re just able to adapt like so fast. And you’re also in tune with, like you said, the nuances of I just know in collaborating with you that. You don’t miss much like a DHD doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention, it just means I spread my attention around to lots of places.

And by the way, my attention is very open and like receptive, which creates like really strong collaboration, particularly when you’re working with a client and you don’t live in their and breathe their industry. But you’re open and you’re listening and you want to combine your skills with their industry and their goals and stuff.

It’s pretty cool. See, I’ve seen that in action. So good on you for that. 

Emily Middleton: Thank you. 

Chris Badgett: Since it comes up a lot, it’s just, I have to ask what’s your current approach to using AI in the work you do, you’re, you write code, you create content. You have to communicate with people and do emails and stuff.

There’s graphic design, which you do a lot of. What’s, what are your, what’s your AI tips or things you do these days? 

Emily Middleton: That’s a good question and I appreciate, I wanna thank you for what you said. About the holistic approach and how the A DHD can be a superpower. I think a lot of, times people feel like they’re at a detriment for it, but it can work for you.

But ai, that’s another good use of A DHD if you struggle to focus, if you struggle to make task lists, whatever you specifically struggle with. AI can be a consultant in your business. Obviously the information AI is. Giving back to you has come back with questionable quality at 80% at, best with like accuracies and stuff.

So you wanna use AI in intelligent ways. But I did create a video and one of my most popular videos as of late was how to code with ai. And I’ve, taken the approach recently of I can’t stop people from coding with ai. I can just help them be safe about how they’re coding with ai. It’s it would be great if we’re like, Hey, code that AI writes. It could potentially have issues, it could break other parts of your website, and at worst it could potentially have malware style practices on your own website. It can be bad to create code with AI and just slap it onto your website, but people are gonna be doing it anyway there.

It’s an efficient solution, it’s an efficient tool, but with great power comes great responsibility, and at present it feels a little bit dangerous, so let’s make it safer. And so a lot of what I’ve been doing with AI is educating my clients on prompting. Specifically, how can we tell AI what its role is?

How can we tell AI what its limits are? How can we help AI help us understand our own problem? So when it comes to coding with ai, when it comes to developing marketing messages with ai, sometimes I will ask AI for copy because it’s, really easy for AI to help inspire getting the juices flowing and saying, give me 10 to 20.

Calls to action. I’m creating a button for my homepage, and this is my business. This is the product that we’re offering. We have a free lead magnet option for people to get involved with our organization with just an email, but we also have a paid offering. I want you to give me 10 options for what calls to action on my homepage could be, and I really want them to be compelling, to get people to click that button and I will generate you a list of 10 things.

You can tell it, Hey, this is. My favorite one of the lists that you had, can you gimme 10 more like it with just that kind of prompting around copywriting, you can already improve the process if you’re just trying to come up with copy out of your own mind. Oftentimes, people who are using LMSs or coming online are technical experts in their field, and sometimes they’re even teachers.

But when you’re online, you’re in this crazy ecosystem of. So many options for people to learn. They could go to YouTube, they could buy someone else’s course. Maybe your course doesn’t even come up page one on Google. So when we are fortunate enough to have someone land on our page, we really need to sell them on taking some action at that point.

AI can help you make copy. AI can help you with code, but you gotta make sure your copy’s not bland. You gotta make sure your code doesn’t blow up your website. You have to be able to structure the conversation with AI as if it’s like a super powerful child. It’s it doesn’t really know what it’s gonna break or how not to do things, but what it does know is a very powerful, like distillation tool of what information it can feed back to you.

So I, it was a little bit of a rambling answer, but does that answer your question? 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to reinforce what Emily’s saying, if you go look at the title of this episode. That was written by ai. I, will choose it. I will give it some ideas, and I do exactly what you said. I’m like, okay, we talked about this, and this.

I need some podcast, some engaging podcast titles that would make somebody interested about the content to click and listen to the episode on Spotify or wherever. And it’ll give me 10 and oftentimes. I still have to tweak like, oh, this is 95% perfect, but I’m changing this word to that word. It’s good to go.

And it’s good. It’s better than what I would’ve done by myself, but I’m not just saying, Hey, just choose one for me and that sort of thing. Let’s talk about web hosting a little bit. As an agency as a freelancer, when you work with clients, a lot of times you hit like hosting problems.

We run into that at LifterLMS because it’s it’s a more heavy, complex piece of software, requires decent resources. Successful LMS sites require really good hosting for a lot of different reasons, and over time you start seeing patterns of oh, this person’s on this host and we’re having problems.

But anyways, I know you’ve run into that as an agency, like what are the. Web hosts that you really love these days. And I’m, I know it’s not an exhaustive list. There’s so many web hosts out there, there’s a lot of great ones, but which ones do you love working with? If you had a client who doesn’t already have something yet, and let’s say they already have a functioning business and they’re not worried about managed WordPress pricing, which is more than like the bargain basement.

Where would you send them to host their web, their LMS website?

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Emily Middleton: That’s a great question. I usually send my clients to Tan. For different size projects, I’ll recommend different hosting. A lot of clients I’ve been sending to tangible XP lately because Gabriel. Shows up on our office hours calls.

And so when you have a CEO of a hosting company who regularly comes to the LifterLMS office hours call, you know that LifterLMS is gonna be supported as a host there. And Gabriel’s been featured on the LMS cast, but so has Tom Fanelli from Conveo, right? And so there’s a lot of other great hosts on the LifterLMS recommended host list, and I wouldn’t blame you for going with any of them.

I have some posts on my website about my experiences with certain web hosts and which ones are often more difficult. I can say a avoid host Gator. I can say that don’t, if you’re on Host Gator, you wanna probably get off Host Gator if you’re doing LMS specifically. Like it’s a complicated, type of plugin that requires a lot of resources. People are logging in, content’s changing based on whether you’re logged in, logged out, there’s access restriction, there’s purchases happening. One second, you’re just a prospect who’s on the checkout page the next second. You’re a student who’s logged in and taking a course.

We need a web host that can support this more fluid functionality that LifterLMS wants to offer on the website. And that’s essential for us. And so I’ve been sending people the tangible XP WP Engine or the LifterLMS recommended host list because that list does change. And you can’t really go wrong in that area.

I’ve just noticed that my customers on tangible xpe, I’ve never had a single complaint and that it’s like LifterLMS specific hosting. It’s not WordPress managed hosting. It’s like LifterLMS. And I know there’s different levels of hosting, like WP Tonic does is Kurt and Jonathan, who you may have seen in the podcast ecosystem.

If you’re watching this, they do a concierge hosting very hands on, but a lot of options out there. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about WordPress itself. WordPress has a challenge of younger people coming in. I’m of the belief that the websites and WordPress is not dead. It’s literally 50% of the web websites on the internet and people use websites all the time, even ai.

Yeah, it’s cool. Where it’s trained on a lot of websites, many of them, WordPress it reminds me of the early days of internet marketing when people would say email is dead. Email has never died. It is still alive and it’s changed. It’s evolved. People use it differently. It’s harder to get people to open.

People are overwhelmed in their inbox and things like that. So the changes. Email will never die, at least not anytime soon. I would say the same thing about websites and WordPress as an example. It is sad to me that I don’t see as many younger people getting into building websites and to their credit, there’s social media has exploded.

TikTok didn’t exist like five years ago or four years ago, whatever. It was like a lot of people spend a lot of time on TikTok, but when they need to go buy something, they’re still gonna end up on a website. There’s the TikTok shop, but they’re either gonna be on the TikTok shop, amazon.com, a Shopify store, or a WooCommerce or some other lifter has e-commerce, like people use websites all the time.

But for a vibrant WordPress ecosystem it’s good for younger folks to get in. You’re a little bit older, I think, than half my age, and you’re very much involved in WordPress, partially because of your family, so you just got, you just got into it very early on and stayed with it, which I commend you for a lot of great things happen by just staying the course.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And it’s easy. There’s also a question in there, like, how does somebody with a DHD stay the course for a decade? Like, why is it, so I’m, painting a lot of broad questions, but what do you particularly love about WordPress and why have you stayed the course? And how what, are some young people, younger people I’m thinking like.

Back in my day or whatever. Now I’m sounding like an old person, but there 15 year olds were like building websites and like having fun and writing HTML and CSS and stuff like that. Or maybe it’s a thing where you’re a little bit older, like you’re getting into your career and you’re like, you start realizing you need a website for yourself and then somebody else is like, Hey, can you build me one of those and stuff like that.

But. Tell. Tell me about your take on WordPress and staying with it. 

Emily Middleton: I like your comparison to social media. I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there, especially for young people to get engaged with social media and then get engaged with Wix or Shopify, which are doing like a lot of marketing on social media, a lot of marketing paying.

YouTubers to talk about WS or Squarespace. So when I talk to young people, WS and Squarespace are the ones that come up as far as CMSs. WordPress doesn’t really come up for younger people, and Shopify, of course. But

I would say WordPress not doing the level of entry level marketing. I don’t quite know how to categorize what Wix Brand awareness. 

Chris Badgett: Like brand, 

Emily Middleton: brand awareness. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. It’s like brand awareness. But even when you open the product, if you like open the box, so when you open your WordPress website for the first time, which everyone listening to this podcast has probably opened a WordPress website for the first time.

And if they haven’t yet, they’re going too soon. And what they’re gonna see is like a blog platform. Hey, this is what you’re gonna create. It’s look, we got a first blog post for you. That’s awesome. It’s like where do you go from there? If you’re not trying to create a blog platform, if you’re trying to go with an LMS, if you’re trying to create an e-commerce store, you are gonna have to go out of your way to find WooCommerce.

You’re gonna have to go outta way your way to find Fluent cart. You’re gonna have to find Lyft. You’re gonna have to find your LMS tool, or you’re gonna have to be looking up, how do I build an online course? Then you’re gonna think about teachable versus like LifterLMS, and it’s oh, if I get lifter LMS, I’m gonna have to use whatever WordPress is, and then you’re gonna learn about WordPress that way.

So there’s multiple ways to come into this, but I specifically started my WordPress experience with LifterLMS in WooCommerce. I didn’t really learn WordPress before Learning Lifter. I didn’t learn WordPress before learning WooCommerce. I learned them. At the same time, I was thinking, how do I create a fully customizable online course platform and I’m using LifterLMS, how do I do wild eCommerce websites?

I’m using WooCommerce and car flows. That was what was available at the time. And so that was my experience coming in and that’s why I think a lot of younger people are not coming in to the WordPress ecosystem, but I think a lot of younger people. Who are 25 to 30, they are getting jobs, building Wix sites, Squarespace websites, and then realizing that the capabilities they have in those areas are limited.

And they’re migrating to, like creating Figma websites as designers. And then things like. The bricks builder or etch, enticed them in using their CSS designer knowledge into WordPress. So many ways that you could come into WordPress, but you probably didn’t start at WordPress unless your mother was like working for a WordPress business.

Sorry. I that’s why I think it takes younger people a little bit longer to get into it. And A DHD and staying the course I. 

Chris Badgett: A DHD is good in WordPress because there’s like tens of thousands of plugins and themes and infinite customizability. You can, spend an eternity exploring WordPress ’cause it’s so vast, right?

Emily Middleton: Yes. You can spend an eternity exploring WordPress and there’s a lot of noise coming your way and so you have to figure out what to exactly to focus on and. So with a DHD, it can be a superpower in that you lock in on certain things. Like I’ve used a lot of other LMSs other than Lifter, but I’ve used LifterLMS more than I’ve used every other LMS combined.

So I’ve really doubled down and I’ve been fortunate to double down on LifterLMS because it’s just got so much customizability, so many features, Chris. A founder and a owner. And that’s something that’s so rare to find in any business online, especially ones that have been around for over a decade. A lot of people get into online business and it’s like super dry and super boring, and it’s super hard.

And so basically they’re trying to be like, Hey, in three to five years we’re gonna sell this thing. We’re gonna take it from the ground and we’re gonna sell it for $10 million. But when you have like a lifestyle brand, when you have founders and passionate community and people behind the products. And you, specifically find the products people put their lives into.

There’s a level of interest and intrigue and fun that comes with that. And so I think part of staying the course is you’re a passion, Chris. I imagine if you were to sell your company and leave WordPress, I might too. I’m literally following you. You’re like actually like a leader to me to be in the industry and have your life in this.

We talk about all kinds of things that aren’t WordPress, like investing and personal stuff, and. I see you as a leader in this industry. So literally if you’re gonna sell out of the industry, I will too. I’m like but I’m following your pilot light here. 

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. And that’s the that’s the power of personal brand.

And again, like the humanity on the internet, like choosing software isn’t just choosing software. You’re choosing the people behind the software. And if you take an interest in that. Even from afar, like if you’re not gonna work at the company or anything, but you get into the people behind the company it’s, that’s the future.

I shouldn’t say that’s the future, but in, in a world of ai. There’s a, that whole human crafted thing of hey, check out this cool LMSI vibe coded over the weekend. And then you’re, getting clients and then you find this LMS that has like a bunch of passionate people and community that have been there forever.

That’s a decision point. And yeah, it’s, and it is super interesting and you made some excellent points about younger people getting into WordPress. I think first of all, there’s so much more. So many more options. Like young kids want to be YouTubers when they grow up. My daughter included. And even me to agree.

I, I still wanna be a YouTuber when I grow up. But the and now there’s TikTok and Instagram and and even WordPress got a lot of new users by writing, like having a public blog. But people tend to write less now or write less depth. They become podcasters or the people that do right, they wanna do like a substack or beehive newsletter and sell ad spots on it or, sponsor spots and stuff.

So there’s just so much more competition that I think you’re right, is like there is no easy way. People find it when they need to find it in their life, when whatever they have is not serving them. Smart and how to market that. Especially like as WordPress, which doesn’t have a centralized marketing department.

It’s, just an interesting challenge. I don’t have the exact solution, otherwise I would’ve put it out there already. Let’s land the plane on WP Course Guide. Tell us about the ideal types of clients you work with and how they can get in touch with you. 

Emily Middleton: The ideal types of clients I work with are.

A wide range of people, but specifically people who are stuck, frustrated, and confused. And ready to get unstuck. I have a lot of expertise because I devote my life to this is like a marketing tech strategy and. Really just getting people unblocked. If you’re blocked in copywriting, if you’re blocked and you need a custom plugin. If you’re blocked and you don’t even know where to start with WordPress or how to put LifterLMS together. Or how to choose your host, or how to connect your domain name to your host, you could be struggling with any of these things.

I’ve spent a decade working on this stuff almost every single day, and so I can help you with a vast, array of things. So those are the people I work with, and you can reach out to me on wp course guide.com. You can Google it. You can Google Magic Emily Middleton. You’ll find me one of those ways.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check wp course guide.com. There’s a contact link right at the top. And I wanna thank you for coming back on the show, Emily, and thank you for being part of the Lifter Mess story. Really appreciate it.

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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Chris Badgett offers a comprehensive overview to the top WordPress plugins in this episode for creating and expanding an LMS website that goes beyond the LifterLMS core. He begins by emphasizing that LifterLMS itself handles almost all of the fundamental LMS features, such as creating courses, student dashboards, user accounts, memberships, e-commerce with PayPal or credit card payments, group sales, and engagement tools like achievement badges, certificates, gamification, and behavior-based emails.

He does, however, stress that extra plugins are frequently required to operate a completely effective and user-friendly LMS site. He suggests the free User Switching plugin, which enables administrators to swap identities to solve difficulties as a student or instructor, and WP Mail Log, which records all transactional emails received from the site, including enrollment notices and password resets, for site administration and user experience. He suggests the free User Switching plugin, which enables administrators to swap identities to solve difficulties as a student or instructor, and WP Mail Log, which records all transactional emails received from the site, including enrollment notices and password resets, for site administration and user experience.

He emphasizes Document Library Pro, a commercial plugin for organizing and graphically displaying files while managing member access, and Embed Any Document, which can be used to display PowerPoint, Keynote, or PDF files within classes. Loco Translate is crucial for modifying the site’s language and material. He recommends Popup Maker for interesting popups and WP Fusion to sync users with automation solutions for marketing, CRM, and revenue management. He suggests utilizing Gravity View in conjunction with a form plugin like as Gravity Forms to gather and present user-submitted data for forms and data management. Additionally, SEO is crucial, and plugins like Rank Math and Yoast SEO may assist increase the exposure of a website.

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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.

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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 Chris Badgett, and today I’m doing a solo episode on the best plugins, the best WordPress plugins for your learning management system website. Besides, of course, LifterLMS, we’re gonna go over free plugins that I use on every LMS site that I build.

Also some paid ones that are my top recommendations for the best plugins. Now, an LMS site is not just courses and memberships and e-commerce and student dashboards. It’s also a fully functioning website that needs, you know, things from marketing, things for operations, things for user experience, and things for scaling for when your website gets really successful.

So think about lifter LMS as the best all-in-one learning management system solution for WordPress. It covers all the LMS features. Everything from courses, student dashboards, user accounts, reporting, uh, gamification, engagement, all that stuff, all that LMS stuff is there. All the membership stuff is there for course, bundles.

For locking down access to other parts of your site, outside of the courses. And, uh, also lifter LMS covers the e-commerce piece. So whether you’re selling with, with taking credit card payments or PayPal payments, or you’re using WooCommerce or you want to do group sales where somebody buys a bunch of seats for a group of people, that’s all covered within the lifter LMS E-commerce.

Then all the engagement features for gamification, like achievement badges, certificates, behavior-based emails that are triggered based on actions in the LMS. This is all included in lifter LMS. So just about everything you need for a learning management system website is covered by or LMS, however.

Lifter. LMS also plays nice in the sandbox with thousands and thousands of other WordPress plugins that do very specific things, some of which have specific integrations for lifter LMS built into their plugin. So I’m gonna go over my top ones today. I do recommend that. You know, you take a minimalist approach to plugins, even when you install lifter LMS, if you have the LifterLMS Infinity bundle, our top plan, I don’t necessarily recommend that you install every single thing we make and turn it on unless you’re gonna use all those features.

’cause LifterLMS has a suite of about 25 different plugins that do different things, but you likely don’t need every single one of those. The main part of this. Podcast is gonna be about the top non lifter LMS plugins that I recommend. So let’s start with some sort of utility plugins for site management and user experience.

So these are two free plugins that I put on every site, and you may not have heard of them. So the first one, which is probably the first plugin I put on any LMS website besides lifter LMS plugins, is called user switching. That’s a free plugin. You can just do a search for it. It’s made by somebody named John Blackborn, and I absolutely love this plugin.

All you do is you install it and what happens is. When you go to the users on your website, if you have this plugin installed and activated, you can switch to that user, which is super helpful for experiencing your website as somebody else on your website. So when somebody tells you, like if you’re doing support for your website, your LMS website, and they say something like, I can’t find X, or I can’t do X, or This thing isn’t working.

The first thing I’ll do is I’ll go to the users on my website. I’ll switch to that user, which is powered by the user switching plugin, and then try to recreate what they’re saying is not working or they can’t find, and I can literally just experience the website as them in the role that they are usually as a student or a teacher on the website.

So that’s super helpful. I use that plugin literally every single day. The next one is called WP Mail Log. Now what that does is it captures all the emails that are sent from your website so that you can look at them. And what I mean by that is we have a whole article on the Lit LMS website about the five different types of emails.

I definitely recommend you check that out. There’s a type of email called transactional email. So these are the most simple example of a transactional email is when somebody forgets their password and they click the for forgot password link. Uh, they enter their email, the website sends them an email, uh, to click a link can choose their new password.

That email communication is transactional email that is not a broadcast email or a marketing email. When Lifter LMS sends email notifications, and there’s many of these, many of these, like a purchase receipt or uh, an enrollment notification or, one of our premium add-ons like private areas, tells a user a new private post is ready for them to look at.

These are all transactional emails. So if you ever want to see all the emails that your website is sending, not from your CRM or your marketing automation tool, but from the website itself, WP Mail log, which is made by a company called WP Vibes, is fantastic for that. So it’s really helpful for just, if you, if someone ever says like, I didn’t get the email, you can go look and you can see like, oh, yep, here it is.

It was timestamped, it was sent. At this time, I can see the content of the email and so on. So, WP Mail log, I highly recommend and that is also free. The next is. Content delivery and learning assets related plugins. So WordPress is a content management system. You can stick anything you’ve seen on the internet.

You can stick on a WordPress website or specifically an LMS website inside of lessons or on course pages or anywhere on your site. Really. So there’s a plugin called Embed any document that I absolutely love. The creator of that is a wsm. There’s a free version I use. They may have a pro version, but the reason I use this is WordPress is great at content management, but sometimes.

It needs a little boost for certain specialized types of documents. So if I ever wanna put, say, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or a Apple keynote presentation inside of a lesson and I just want to put that PowerPoint file or that keynote file as the content, I can do that with embed any document and I’m just using the free plugin for that.

Which is also great with when you have that document in your WordPress media library using LifterLMS’s features to protect that content and make that media private so the public can never find that document. Only the people that are supposed to find it can find it. It’s pretty awesome. But anyways, go get yourself the embed, any document plugin.

Another one, which is a premium plugin made by Barn two is called Document Library Pro. This is awesome. What this allows you to do if your LMS website. Your courses, or your coaching programs have a lot of files like templates, document, PDF documents, cheat sheets. And spreadsheets, certain images, maybe CSV files, tons of different files are part of your membership or your LMS document.

Library Pro allows you to easily organize those, present those in a beautiful visual way, even inside of a table and stuff. Stuff like that. So, for example, the easiest way to think about it is if you have a coaching program, and let’s say you have 20 courses in there. It’s all sold through one membership.

They get the courses, but they also get this resource library. You can organize all those files using document Library Pro. And present them in a very visual way. LifterLMS will then kind of come on top of that and protect access to those files for your members. So go check out Document Library Pro, which is made by Barn two plugins.

The next thing I wanna talk about is just internationalization and customizing text and language on your website. The top plugin we recommend for that, which is also free is called Loco Translate. That has over a million installs. It has, it’s made by somebody named Tim W and. So basically you can translate a lifter LMS website without custom development.

Personally, I use loco translate in a little bit of a different way where. Let’s say I want to customize something that LifterLMS does or another plugin does. There’s the text and the content you put on your site. But there’s all these words and language all over your site. That are kind of automatically generated that you can’t edit.

So an example of that would be at the bottom of every LifterLMS lesson is a mark complete button. And you can’t edit that the words mark complete. But if you’re using loco translate, let’s say your site’s still in English, but you want it to say finish class instead of Mark complete. You could just load up loco translate, find the mark complete string, and change it to finish class.

Super fast, super easy. That’s using the Free Loco Translate plugin. The next area of of plugins. I want to talk about is marketing, CRM and revenue operations. So a top pick in the LifterLMS community is WP Fusion. That’s made by, very good plugins. So what WP Fusion does, they do have a free version, but I definitely recommend the paid version is it basically syncs your site with your CRM or marketing automation platform.

So, for example, LifterLMS has integration directly with Kit previously ConvertKit and MailChimp. Back when we were building those, there were many others we wanted to build. But then WP Fusion showed up and built integration with LifterLMS. Which means that whenever somebody enrolls in a course or becomes a user on your site, they’re automatically synced to your marketing automation or CRM tool.

And there’s many companies, many CRM marketing automation platforms, most of them are integrated with WP Fusion. So, besides Kit and MailChimp, there are many other popular ones like ActiveCampaign. Keep HubSpot, Zoho, CRM, Salesforce. All of these can be, are easily integrated using. WP Fusion. So when things happen on your WordPress LMS website, a user is created.

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Or you know, they enroll in a certain course and you want something to happen in the CRM or the marketing automation platform, or you want your users segmented by course so that they can be emailed as groups or cohorts separately based on their enrollment. That’s all possible with WP Fusion. It has some more fancy stuff.

It does. I definitely recommend you get a license to WP Fusion. The next one is Popup Maker by Code Atlantic, which is an awesome tool. Popup Maker has actually sponsored this podcast, so you might be seeing a popup maker, spot in this episode. But Popup Maker is incredible. I use it on all my sites.

I use it on lifter lms.com. I use it on Academy dot Lifterlms.com and many other sites that we have, and popup Maker has super deep integration to Lifter LMS, so Popup Maker allows you to use popups. Now, we have done a webinar with Popup Maker recently, where we go over all the details and how it works and what it does.

But there’s a lot of reasons to have tasteful, ethical, fun, engaging popups on your site. There’s things like exit intent. If somebody’s gonna leave and you want to pop a message before they go, or let’s say somebody clicks a button and you want something to pop up for them to enter their email to download a resource.

Or let’s say somebody’s abandoning a cart on a LifterLMS checkout and you want to throw a pop-up up with a discount code or remind them the value of what they’re purchasing or whatever. That’s all possible with popup maker and the integration is super deep with lifter LMS. It will really blow your mind once you start looking at all the things you can do with popup maker and lifter LMS together.

The next area I want to talk about is, using data forms and building custom experiences. Now Lifter, LMS has integration with four form plugins, gravity forms, ninja Forms, formidable forms, and WP Forms, OS form or, what’s it called? Mark West Guard’s form. WS form is also another great one. So every WordPress website needs a form plugin.

I recommend one of those five. I’m gonna use Gravity Forms as an example, simply because that’s what I’ve used for a long time on lifter lms.com. So all my form stuff is really done with Gravity forms because I’ve been using it forever. And the next tool I’m gonna tell you about, requires gravity forms to work.

But, yeah, you, you, you have a contact page on your site. Maybe you want to do an application process before people can join your coaching program or your membership. Maybe you wanna register people for something, or you want to collect email addresses so people can get a lead magnet or a resource to add value to them while growing your email list.

And again, WP Fusion, which I mentioned earlier, integrates with all these forms. So when people fill out these forms, it can pass the data to your marketing automation tool as well. So if you’re using Gravity Forms, I highly recommend you get Gravity View, which is made by Gravity Kit. This is a premium plugin that has deep integration with lifter LMS, and it kind of, we, we have episodes on this podcast with Zach Katz that you can check out.

If you want to go deep into gravity view and gravity kit and what all that does, but essentially, what gravity view allows you to do is take form data through a form and then display that data on your website wherever you want, however you want, as a view. So to give you a simple example, you could have a gravity form.

That people leave testimonials for your website. They fill out, like, let’s say the last lesson in your course. Ask people to leave a testimonial. They fill out the form, you know, they add their picture, they add their message, you know, they put in their website name all the pieces we need for an effective testimonial.

And then they submit it and it can either publish instantly to, to the front end or go through a moderation step where you, as the site owner would review it before it goes live, but it basically automates collection of data and displaying that data publicly. There’s all kinds of fancy stuff you can do with Gravity View too, inside of courses, like where, let’s say you have a course that helps somebody build a business.

And they are building a business plan as they go through the course, through the various lessons and they keep submitting their information one lesson at a time. All that form data is, collecting into a. What ultimately becomes a business plan, PDF and complete business plan. But you’re collecting that data and you get this visual view that only that user can see of their business plan.

So there’s so much you can do with Gravity View, check that out. The other area is SEO plugins, which are really helpful for getting traffic and building your. Reach in your audience and the amount of people that discover you over time.

SEO still matters even in a world of ai. So there’s, there’s very specific, SEO is even more important for LMS websites than more of a regular marketing site because so much content is behind a login.

So to get found organically through something like a Google search. You really want to have some public content on your site, like a blog, you know, informational pages and so on. And what SEO plugins do is they kind of make sure your site is in the right structure so search engines can read it. It gives you opportunity to modify things like meta descriptions.

To work with your writing to make sure you’re using your keywords effectively. If you want to be found when somebody types a specific search into a search engine. So there’s many great SEO plugins out there. I’ve been using Yost SEO for a long time. I know folks also like rank math or all-in-one SEL.

Definitely any website. If it’s a business and you want help getting found on the internet, I do recommend installing an SEO plugin. Installing an SEO plugin and activating it doesn’t instantly mean that you have great SEO. Now. It just means you have the infrastructure to work on your SEO and improve things so.

You know, those are my top plugins. I’m not making this like my favorite 100 plugins ’cause there’s literally hundreds of plugins that. I love that do very specific things. But if I boil it all down into a plugin set that I would put on literally every LMS website I would build.

Number one is LifterLMS and whatever lifter LMS add-ons I need. But I would also put on user switching.

WP Mail Log, embed any document, Loco Translate, WP Fusion, popup Maker Gravity View Document Library Pro, a form plugin, and an SEO plugin. And that’s it. That’s my minimalist approach to the best plugins for a WordPress.

Learning management system website. So LifterLMS is all about helping you succeed. This podcast, we normally talk about topics, to help you grow, not just about how lifter LMS works and how software works and stuff like that, but I wanted to do a technology focused e episode because we get this question all the time.

Particularly if you’re newer to WordPress. Go check out all the resources I mentioned. It’s about eight different plugins. Try and take a minimalist approach. But just know that the eight or so that I’ve recommended here are the top WordPress plugins. Most of them are free or have a free version that I put on every learning management system website that I build, and you would get incredible benefit from using as well.

That’s it for this episode. Reach out to LifterLMS with any questions. If you have tech questions or tools, drop comments below this. If you have tech questions and are trying to figure out plugins, we also have a dedicated page on our website. Just do a Google search for LifterLMS recommended resources.

In there, we’ll have a more expansive list of the top plugins that we recommend and web hosting and all kinds of stuff. For other software and hardware tools that you need for a learning management system website. I’m Chris from LifterLMS, and I hope you enjoyed this 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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this LMScast, Chris Badgett clarifies that “profiting from pain” refers to generating enormous value via the resolution of significant issues rather than exploiting people. Because conventional educational systems concentrate on teaching knowledge (mechanisms) rather than addressing why someone urgently needs that information, pain is frequently misinterpreted in the classroom. In actuality, they purchase pain alleviation and a clear route to a better result rather than classes, coaching, or memberships.

He presents Dane Maxwell’s client-Result-Mechanism structure, stressing that everything must begin with a single client rather than a product. The course or coaching program is only the means by which the client transitions from suffering to relief. The client has a problem they wish to avoid and a goal they wish to achieve. The majority of course designers fail because they don’t fully get the suffering that generates actual market demand and instead think like experts, creating material first.

Chris distinguishes clearly between severe pain and mild discomfort. An instigating event, such as a divorce, the birth of a child, sleeplessness, slowed company development, or an impending deadline like retirement or a lease expiration, can cause acute pain. People actively seek out answers and are prepared to spend since these difficulties are urgent, time-bound, and emotionally taxing. For this reason, pain-relieving offerings perform better than proactive but non-urgent “vitamin” courses.

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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. Today I’m gonna be doing a solo episode with you about how to profit from pain. So pain is very misunderstood in the education space. We’re gonna get into that. When I talk about profit, I’m not talking about exploitation, I’m talking about value creation.

So having a clear offer with clear conversions and more impact by solving pain, how to think about pain differently. By the way, we have a whole lesson in the Lifter LMS Academy course called the Perfect Offer Playbook, where we go even deeper on pain than what we’re gonna talk about today here. But I wanted to loop you in to start thinking differently about pain.

Either in a new online course or coaching program or even business that you’re creating and how does leverage that to your advantage so that you can create much more impact, make more profit, have more fun, have a lot less friction, and doing the hard work of education entrepreneurship. So there’s a great old episode on this podcast that I did with Dane Maxwell.

He dropped this solution from his book Start From Zero. He says that the holy grail of business is three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. And once I heard that framework and started using it and what I do, everything just started clicking for me. And we’re gonna. Unpack that, but basically you have to have a clear customer.

I’m a big fan of putting a customer at the center of your business, not your product or your service, or your course, your membership or your offer. So a clear customer, the mechanism is how you do what you do. Ideally, it’s a unique mechanism. Now your mechanism will be unique no matter what, because there’s only one you, which doesn’t mean you can’t borrow.

Pieces and parts from other folks, just like I just did with Dane Maxwell’s framework of the customer result mechanism. But the mechanism is basically how you do what you do when you create a course and it’s teaching somebody something. Maybe there’s quizzes, assignments, action items, and so on. The course is really the mechanism to create a result for the person.

The result is the third piece of customer result or customer mechanism result. A clear customer has a specific pain they want solved. They want the result, which is to move away from that pain towards pleasure. And the way that you do that is through your unique mechanism. So that’s the framework we’re operating under, but we’re gonna talk almost exclusively on the customer aspect and within the customer aspect, we’re gonna talk about the pain.

So the cost of mechanism first thinking, which is actually what most course creators do, and it’s not their fault. And I’ll tell you why in a second, is I’m a subject matter expert. I know all these things. Let me just give you my mechanism. Whether that’s getting in shape, starting a business, finding the love of your life, whatever it is, I have a mechanism for that, and my course just teaches you exactly what to do with all of that.

But the cost of mechanism first thinking is that you’re starting to build features of a product, a course in this case, or a coaching program without really understanding the pain deeply. So you’re giving either too many ideas or cool ideas versus really following the market pull that is generated by pain.

So this is a very common trap in course creator businesses, membership sites, any kind of e-learning or coaching co company. Is we as subject matter experts become mechanism first thinkers. Or we are basically, ’cause we’re in love with all these cool mechanisms that we found that can help somebody.

But the challenge is a lot of people don’t start with the most important question. When they’re creating an online education offer, which is who? Who is this for? And we’ve all heard about the customer avatar, the ideal customer profile. All of these things, but so you need to have a specific who to make your course targeted, but within that, who is the actual pain that all, everything that we’re doing bubbles up from When you understand the pain deeply, it makes it much easier to sell.

It makes it much easier to create content and so on. And the truth is that. An audience or a market does not buy a mechanism. They want a solution to their pain. Now that pain might just be boredom and they want entertainment. That’s what movies do as an example. So there’s different types of pain.

There’s what I would call big T trauma or little T trauma or, just a, there’s all kinds of flavors of how severe is the pain, how important is this pain? How much will this pain make the person want to take action, or is it a pain that they can just ignore? There’s a lot of details in the pain, but my recommendation to you is to find what’s known as an acute pain.

So what makes an acute pain different from vague discomfort? Acute pain often has something like what we call in copywriting, an inciting incident, and what that means is it says place in time where something happens and it generates a lot of pain and it’s very like time bound like this happens, then this pain happens.

And once we target that, we get really specific. With our acute pain. So just to give some examples of acute pain, there are so many out there, but I’ll just give you some off the top of my head. One example might be a relationship has ended, whether that’s a divorce or breakup, that’s an acute pain.

So back in the day when I used to study affiliate marketing exam as an example. On the affiliate marketplace called ClickBank, where you could find affiliate offers to promote the top selling information product on that platform was called. How to Get Your X Back. Okay, which is a very specific customer result mechanism, clear, plain pain point. Clear result, all in the name of the information product, which was like a course or an ebook, something like that.

So getting dumped by a partner or a spouse. Or even in your dating years is very painful. And so this offer. How to get your ex back is tying into the pain that comes when a breakup happens in a relationship. And that is a very acute pain when you have a new baby especially as a first time parent. It creates pain now.

Pain, having a child can be a beautiful, wonderful thing. It makes your heart grow bigger. I love my children, but when they come, new pains emerge. Like impact on sleep, impact on, let’s say the husband and wife relationship impact on your work. ’cause now you have this other full-time job called being a parent.

Okay? So there’s a lot of pain here. I remember watching someone launch a course and coaching program on sleep training for first time parents for their new babies. This person was basically a sleep coach. So that is a mechanism like I’m gonna, I’m gonna help give you the tools and tips and strategies and tactics to help set your child off on a good foundation of sleep.

And for you, the parents. But it’s very specific. Another example, if we’re talking about sleep there’s a lifter LMS user that does very well who works on the pain of insomnia. So insomnia is very painful if you’ve ever experienced it. I’ve been there. I’m not, I’ve always struggled with sleep, and that is a pain that I would be willing to invest in to get a solution or IE the result.

So that I can live in the world like a normal, well-rested human being. So, insomnia is an obvious great pain. There are all kinds of medical conditions or psychological conditions that create pain. When we think about pain, we’re often thinking about physical pain. Some of the examples I’m talking about are obvious, but there’s a lot less.

Obvious kinds of pain. For example, in business you might not have any physical pain. But let’s say you’ve created your product and nobody’s buying it. That’s very painful. Let’s say you have a successful business and you’ve been growing every year, and all of a sudden that growth stops, that’s called a growth ceiling.

A growth ceiling, even though you’re doing well, but you stop growing is a painful event. So that stalled growth. Creates pain. That was the I stalled. Growth is the inciting incident, if you will. Next, let’s talk about the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin. So a, let’s call it a course that is a painkiller will definitely remove and solve the pain.

S a vitamin is more like a proactive solution that maybe is a good idea, but there’s no clear, obvious pain underneath it. For example, if you look at something online like the biohacking community or the longevity community. These are people who want to get in the best shape of their lives, even when they’re older.

They may want to try and live forever. That’s the longevity community. And these people do a lot of proactive things and they, they actually take a lot of vitamins and supplements and things, but the biohacking community is super small compared to the global population because biohackers.

By design are very proactive and maybe some of their motivation is driven by an acute pain as well. But it’s a smaller market within the broader market because a lot of biohacking things are proactive and the reality is. A lot of the population is reactive. So an incident happens, they experience a lot of pain, and they they go looking for solutions.

So finding an acute pain it’s really obvious when you find one. So if you’ve ever experienced a challenge like it could be anything like, let’s say you’re a. Looking to buy your very first house. Alright, there’s some pain there because you don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to negotiate the price.

You don’t know. You wanna make sure you’re picking the right house for the largest financial transaction of your life. And let’s say your lease is up for your apartment in four months and you need to figure this thing out. So we have a deadline. This creates a lot of urgency around that pain of needing to find a place to sleep at night that you can afford and so on.

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and I also wanted to come back to what I said earlier about the reason a lot of us don’t focus a lot on pain is. Because we were raised in a traditional school system. Where almost all of that is just teaching you mechanism after mechanism. So if you remember yourself or you have a child who said a certain subject matter was not very interesting, and they’re not into it and they don’t like it, it’s because they’re being given a mechanism for a pain.

They do not feel. So it’s the concept of. Just in case information versus just in time. So if you create a course, like just in case when you’re ready for it, you may want to learn these investing strategies and financial planning strategies so that you can retire one day. That’s very different from creating an investing course for people who are, let’s say.

10 years away from retirement and have no savings or investments. You have a mechanism to help them get them to a retirement-ready financial position. They’re feeling the pain of retirement approaching and having zero nest egg. That’s very painful. If I was required in school to take a class on financial or investing literacy, but I’m not feeling that pain, I would be a lot less motivated to do that.

Let’s talk about finding the right pain for you. You wanna find the overlap of the pain that your niche or your target market feels. You want to think about your lived experience. And how you have credibility and interest in this specific pain. This is why we often give the advice if you’re looking to create a course or coaching program or membership site, to focus on a earlier version of yourself.

Because number one, you’ve walked the journey, you were the customer, you figured out the mechanism somehow, and then you got the result. You remember that earlier version of yourself where there was so much pain, whether it was wanting to become an entrepreneur and start your own business, or to find the love of your life, or make some kind of health and fitness improvement, if you have walked those miles yourself, you’ll understand the pain.

You will also understand the inefficiencies. The mechanisms that you tried to put together to solve that pain. If you think you can solve that better and faster, it can work out well to create a truly unique and great training course. And remember, people pay for four things, speed, certainty, insight, and the fourth, which is to stay out of jail.

So if we. Look at something like an example we’ve already used, let’s say about the insomnia when we’re buying a course or a coaching program, if we’re the target market, the customer, we want either speed, like we want this insomnia to stop fast. We want certainty that it’s gonna stop and we’re gonna transform and transcend this challenge.

We want insight into why is this happening? How does this insomnia thing work? And we also wanna stay outta jail because if we keep going through life, sleep deprived, we might make bad decisions that could land us in a bad place. And usually one of those four things is primary. You don’t necessarily hit all four.

But I bring that up to say there will be one. That is primary to the pain that you solve. It could be speed getting away from pain. It could be certainty that you definitely can get out of the pain and that the, this program is gonna work. Or it could be insight. Just like really understand what’s really going on here.

That’s part of what psychology and psychological health is. Is, it’s all of those things, but it’s also includes a lot of insight into understanding what’s really going on, trying to get closer to base reality. So insight is very powerful too. And when you’re finding your pain, you basically have to marry the pain and really just devote yourself and your product and your program to it.

And it needs to have a strong course creator. Market fit, like you may see a pain out there, but if it’s not a pain you’ve experienced before or you only want to go after it because it’s trending in society or on social media or online or whatever, that’s not a good motivation. It really needs to fit you to have that founder market fit in.

When you’ve walked those miles, if you’re solving a pain through a course that you’re creating and launching that you have solved for yourself in your own life, that gives you a lot more credibility. You’re basically teaching from scars your own personal life scars and trauma that you’ve transcended than just putting theories out there and ideas and research and.

When you fall in love with an acute pain that’s right for you it creates long-term sustainability and motivation. For example, the pain that we truly solve at lifter LMS is that I see all this value trapped inside of people where they could go help lots of other people with pain in the world.

It’s a Buddhist thing in terms of reducing suffering. That’s really motivating to me. I love being in the pain removal business. We’re doing that with software, we’re doing that with content. But I love solving the pains of education entrepreneurs, which is, there’s three results they’re going for, which is income.

Impact in the world and creative freedom. Creative freedom is just designing the life and the way you work, the way you wanna work. So that’s super motivating to me and that’s why I’ve been doing this for over 15 years at this point. So it’s important to remember the nobility of solving pain. Pain is a signal, it’s not a weakness.

There’s a reason the human body. Experiences pain, whether in the body or in the mind, because it’s a signal something needs to be addressed. And when you find a pain and you build a solution to help solve pain, it becomes much easier to sell because you’re in the business of helping reduce the suffering, if not solve it for other people.

That is the most ethical, moral, human thing you can do as a human. So when you know you can help somebody solve pain, it’s, it makes selling easy ’cause you’re just trying to help people. So the next thing I want to talk about is the practical application and how you can look at this with your online course or membership site.

Now, there’s two ways to look at it. If you’re already moving and things are going pretty well and you’re making in income impact and creative freedom in your life, that’s great, but maybe you can jump in and just reexamine the pain that you solve. Study it more. See if you can articulate better in your messaging, in your copywriting.

Weave the pain into what you do. You’re not trying to manipulate people. You’re just trying to throw the signal out that this is exactly the pain that we work on for these types of people. This is how we do it, which is the mechanism. And I would like to invite you to, for me to come, help bring this information, this education, this coaching, this content into your life to help solve the pain.

If you’re newer and you’re just getting started with like your first course or your first coaching program, you are in a great opportunity to do the reflection, to audit your own life, to look at the all the pains and challenges that you’ve overcome. Look at your skills, your life experience, your knowledge, the knowledge of others.

Look at the research, do competitive analysis, and really find those pains. And also look for pain that is urgent. So when you have a new baby come into your home, it creates urgency. When you, let’s say enter a new relationship, it creates urgency. If you really hate your job and you’re trying to find something else to do with your career and your life, there’s urgency there.

And there’s also opportunity costs. Like what happens if they do nothing? They don’t move forward. Like, how, what will the pain do? Will it just keep remaining chronic? Will it get worse? What opportunity costs are lost by doing nothing and so on. So think about this, even beyond software as an example.

So if and courses and coaching and online communities. How can we work with this pain in a way that where we’re just a catalyst for reducing the suffering out in the world? And what do we want to commit our education entrepreneurship work to? So when you have a clear pain, you get better students and you get better outcomes.

The mechanism or your course content, or your coaching or your online communities, it all gets so much better when you’re, you really start with a clear customer with a clear, very specific pain. It happens to me in my life. It’s happened many times where I have an acute pain and then I go online and I start looking and I start finding.

A hundred books on the topic or in these courses and these Facebook groups and Reddit threads and be a pain anthropologist because there’s, once you really isolate the pain and look at it just like when I was getting ready to have my first baby, I went into the the books and the websites and the content and the courses.

Because it’s urgent, like you only have nine months, probably less to once you’ve realize what’s happening, to get ready to solve the pain of not being ready to have a kid. And then you’ll see giant communities around these core pains of having your first child or starting your first business or, dropping weight if you’re, you’ve been struggling with weight as an example, or whatever the physical or the fitness goal is. So Lifter, LMS is an enabler in this process to help you solve pain for your people. Lifter LMS is not the hero. You’re the hero in your niche ending suffering for. Whatever your core customer’s main what their main pain is.

So if you’re already moving, I want to encourage you to just revisit, even if you think your business is pretty good and pretty solid, really dial into the pain. There’s a concept in entrepreneurship called a pivot. Let’s say your business is doing well, but it’s not, it hasn’t replaced your day job or anything like that.

A lot of times when that’s happening and you have some traction, either you’re not clear enough on the pain or there’s another pain adjacent that is, would be much better that your same person has at the same time. So you’re focusing on the wrong pain. So for example, in business coaching or in entrepreneurship, let’s say you’re focused on a specific mechanism about, how to sell more as an example. So you’re a sales coach, but you’re a full stack entrepreneur and you really understand all the stuff. But then you realize, a lot of my people, they’re taking my sales training and they’re doing all right, but they’re not doing great. Let’s revisit. Maybe I should also add some coaching or another course on developing the product that we sell, which happens before you sell.

Because maybe they’re trying, they’re selling too hard on the wrong product and then that, product aspect of your training takes off because you found an even hotter pain. So it’s okay to pivot or add on or even just try something new. So the best thing you can do as an education entrepreneur is listen to the market and.

A lot of times we stand around with our fingers in our ears, not listening to the market, just making what we wanna make, making assumptions about pain and results and who our customers are. But I call this, the ground game. You gotta get out from behind your computer. You gotta go hang out with the people that are having this pain.

You gotta talk to ’em. You gotta ask them what have they tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked? What provided temporary relief, but not lasting relief. Get dig into the pain is my point. So that’s it on this episode of how to Profit From Pain. Again, we’re not profiting to exploit, we’re profiting because we’re creating extreme value because we understand the pain, the nuances of the pain, and, pain is something we want to heal, so it’s not like we’re profiting from people in pain. We’re actually profiting from helping people heal.

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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Chris Badgett offers a comprehensive guide on how to strategically plan your online education business for 2026 in this LMScast episode. He emphasizes that planning is about developing clarity, focus, and adaptability to maximize the probability of success rather than forecasting the future. He starts out by emphasizing how crucial it is to determine your main audience, or the “who,” and comprehend their requirements, goals, and frustrations. Chris clarifies that many business owners erroneously concentrate on their product or method rather than the results that their clients need, and he advocates delving deeply into details like quickness, assurance, understanding, or preventing unfavorable outcomes.

Chris presents a multi-layered strategy for planning.In order to create ambitious long-term goals, he suggests beginning with a 10-year vision, reducing it to a 3-year vision for more achievable milestones, and finally creating a comprehensive 1-year plan. From there, weekly and daily execution guarantees momentum and advancement, while quarterly themes aid in prioritizing focal areas, important projects, and initiatives.

He highlights the significance of “anti-goals,” or things you consciously choose not to pursue in order to stay focused and avoid distractions. He also emphasizes how important it is to link your company with its goal, vision, and values. Values influence your decision-making and corporate culture, vision reflects the long-term effect you wish to generate for your audience, and mission outlines how you will do it. Chris demonstrates how these components influence hiring, team duties, and leadership choices using examples from LifterLMS.

Chris delves into operational planning, outlining how to view your company as a “product” made up of people, procedures, and technology. Even for solopreneurs, he advises creating a basic organizational chart to clearly define roles and duties and to choose where to assign or employ staff.

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

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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 Chris Badgett, and today I’m doing a solo episode about how to plan for an entire year as I’m recording this. It’s the tail end of 2025, and we have a resource on the Lifter LMS website in the lifter LMS Academy called the Annual Planning System.

I’m gonna go over some of the highest level. Concepts in that, but I would encourage you to go check out the annual planning system. I happen to actually be a very big planner and believer in plans and there’s so much going on in our space in terms of. Change and disruption and the economy and geopolitics and everything that having a plan, an intentional plan, but more importantly than a plan, is the system you use to create the plan can really increase your odds of success as a course creator, a coach, a membership site owner as a WordPress professional who builds learning management system websites for clients.

I’m gonna give you all the secret sauce on planning. And, we’re in this interesting stage where the education market is maturing. We have artificial intelligence accelerating in the world, in the economy, in tech. But keep in mind that planning doesn’t equal prediction, but what a plan gives you is a much higher odd of success.

So there’s a famous quote that Mike Tyson says that everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. But what I wanna say is the act of planning and coming up with a strong plan is super important and makes you far more robust and capable and clear. A better leader and just an easier way of being in the world in terms of business and even life.

So this is for the course creators, coaches, membership site owners and agencies out there. And we’re gonna go over, the planning stack because it all cascades down from the plan. And the problem with entrepreneurship is a lot of us. I have to constantly zoom in and zoom out. We may zoom out and work on a strategic thing, and then we have to get in the weeds and work on a very small technical issue or work with a specific customer or work with a team member.

But what I encourage you to do is to create the space to actually stay zoomed out and create a really high level plan, but then also start taking step functions down. From a big vision to a annual plan, to a quarterly plan and, down to a monthly plan, down to a weekly plan, down to your daily action and project management and things like that.

The annual plan basically, which is what we’re primarily focused on today, is gonna set the direction the quarterly plan creates focus. The weekly execution creates the momentum of executing on the plan. But the common failure points are that plans are too vague or not committed to, or there literally is no plan.

I’m often shocked when I see. Entrepreneurs of all kinds, not just education entrepreneurs, literally with zero plan in 100% reactive mode. And it’s sad because life and business could be so much better with some planning. That doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get setbacks or some kind of macro shift from the global economy or whatever, and things are just gonna change in your plan.

Kind of gets outdated, but it’s the active planning that is super important. And it’s important to mention that even if your plan gets hit hit off track by some event, it doesn’t mean you can’t pivot the plan, edit the plan, change the plan, re or reprioritize what’s in the plan. The first thing we’re gonna talk about is really your core focus when it comes to a plan.

You’ve heard me mention if you’ve listened to this podcast, I think Dane Maxwell, who we interviewed on this podcast a while ago, said it best that a business is really only three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. So the customers who you serve, the result is the outcome that they want, usually pleasure, pain, or transformation based, and the mechanism is how you facilitate.

The result for the core customer. That’s literally all businesses. And we have a challenge in our industry where a lot of folks are super focused on their mechanism, like what we do, how we do it. I sell to people who want what I know how to do. It’s very vague, but the first part of creating an annual plan.

Is to really drill in on that core focus and find the signal and the noise. The first part I just wanna say, and I, the, I’ve been in this industry for almost two decades and I realize that the number one thing missing from most businesses that hold them back from successes online education companies is the who you should always start with.

The who. Who are we helping? Who is it? Who is the customer? Some people call that the customer avatar, the ideal customer persona. But what in reality happens is a lot of people are not very clear on the who, and they’re just saying I help anybody who wants what I do. So that’s not a WHO statement, that’s a mechanism first thinking statement.

So we gotta get clear on who we serve. As you create your plan, the number one thing I would recommend you do is to figure out and even challenge yourself if you think you’re clear on who it is that you help. So you gotta develop that. You gotta question even if you think you’re already doing it and you’ve got a clear.

Target market and customer avatar and stuff. I want to challenge you to keep drilling in on the who do you help? What are their pains, what are their frustrations? What do they want? What results do they want? I heard I think it was Dev Basu who said that customers only want four things to save time.

What was the other one? Sorry. Save time. Oh, here we go. Sorry. Lemme back that up. What he said is, customers are looking for four things, speed, certainty, and insight. And the fourth one, which is funny, but not really, is to stay outta jail. So when you are creating an offer for a specific person.

They’re either looking for speed, certainty or insight or to stay outta jail. So when you’re really clear on your who is, and you figure out which one of those like primaries are between speed, certainty, and sight stay outta jail, you’re starting to get much more crystallized around who it is you help, how you help them, and the benefit that they see in you, which now are tied into the result or the transformation.

So let’s assume that you have figured out who you help. ’cause your plan, if you make it about you and what you want oh, I wanna make more money. I want, I don’t want as many obligations on my time. I want to create passive income and automation and all these things. That’s not really a plan, that’s just what you want personally.

A great plan is built around. The people that you serve, the people that you help. So I’m a big believer in that you should put your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So let’s, when it comes to annual planning, let’s put our customer at the center, not our product. So we’ve got the who in the center of our business.

We know what they want we know we have the unique mechanism to help them get what they want. Now we need to come up with a plan to actually make this happen. So in order to make that plan happen, what we also need to do is work on ourselves and our company culture, and we need to do the mission, vision, values work.

So to go over it briefly, there’s a lot we could do on mission, vision, and values. We have a whole training on this and the perfect offer playbook in the lifter LMS Academy. But just to, put the basic ideas out there. A vision is the world that you want to create for your who, for your avatar, for the customer that’s literally at the center of your business.

One way to think about vision if you’re a little stuck when it comes to your subject matter expertise. Is to think about what wrong do you wanna right in the world? So that’s, you can back into your vision by doing an anti vision of the world you don’t wanna live in or you don’t wanna see.

Keep persisting and fix that for a specific type of person because you have the skills, experience, and knowledge to do that. This is the territory of vision. Mission is how you do it, what success looks like, or what the opposite of failure looks like. Lifter, LMS is an example. Our vision is to, in the broadest sense, lift up others through online education.

I believe that education entrepreneurs are some of the most powerful, impactful. Positive outcome generating people in the world. So I throw out a stone with my software lifter, LMS, an education entrepreneur, picks that up and then throws out a stone to help their ideal learner get the results that they’re looking for, that which then helps more people.

So it’s like a stone in the water that has multiple. Outward ripples of positive impact in the world while also creating financial impact and creative freedom. So this is the vision territory where I live, but the mission is to help, a million education entrepreneurs change the world through online education by launching successful courses, coaching programs, education companies.

Internal training resources for inside companies and so on. That’s the mission. The values are how you do what you do. So Lifter, LMS has seven core values and when the first time I heard about values, I think of it as being cheesy. So for example there are cheesy values like.

Integrity, honesty synergy collaboration. Now, those aren’t bad, if you, if those align with you. But to really create strong values, I think you have to get way more specific and not just come up with a name, but actually explain what it means for you. For example, the lifter, LMS company values are community focused.

Reduce friction, continuous improvement. Learner results First, extreme ownership, clear communication, and fulfill potential. Now, I’m not gonna go into a big thing about what each of these mean, but these are values that I embody as a leader in the company and I hire and fire against those values.

Whenever I have a difficult decision as a company, I go to those values. They’re super important and a lot of what we do is about reducing friction. That’s, if I had to pick one, that was our primary, that’s what we do. We reduce friction through software and also content like you’re watching right now, like this content is a, I’m trying to reduce friction in your life by sharing with you.

An annual planning system that I’ve used for a very long time. That really works. So that’s mission, vision, and values. So the next thing you wanna do is comes from the personal development world in terms of developing a a vision that’s more. Like a vision board, something that you can see and basically, even if you have a hard time thinking about that, like I know as a parent, when I ask my kids, where do you see yourself in five years or 10 years?

They have no idea. And you might be listening to this and be like I’m an adult. I don’t have any idea where I’m gonna be in 10 years, but I’ll encourage you to slow down, press pause. And Dan Martel says, dream a little bit. Think about, what do, where do I want to be in 10 years? I wanna see, a lot of people creating online training platforms.

’cause I personally believe that there’s a course inside all of us learning and teaching is part of the human experience. And I see all I’ve always seen this, I see all this value trapped in. People where they’re not sharing it, they’re not helping other people. I call it hoarding all the value. So in 10 years, I want to see a million people using lifter LMS, making money, changing the world and creating like ideal, extremely creative lives that they’re super happy with and proud of.

But we can get specific. In constructing a 10 year vision, so what do you want your annual revenue to be? As an example lifter as an example, we’ve already achieved this where we have customers in every country. I don’t think we have a customer in Antarctica, but we have a customer in almost probably 99% of every single country.

And that was on division on the plan a long time ago, and we’ve achieved that. What do you wanna be recognized as a leader of how many employees do you want? Do you want a big company? Do you want a small company? Do you want to be a solopreneur? Do you want to be a micro business, a big business?

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Do you want to go out on the stock market and have an IPO? What do you want? What kind of like sales motion do you want? What kind of conversion rate do you want? What do you, if you saw yourself on a stage 10 years from now, not from an egocentric way, but just from a celebration of success, what award would you be receiving an award for?

Is it a, like some kind of YouTube award? Is it a humanitarian award? Is it a Nobel Prize? What is it? Dream a little bit. So come up with your 10 year target. And the other thing to create a plan around is like, what’s your main marketing strategy? Marketing is attracting customers. So what does that look like?

How do you close sales after you’ve got the lead? Where what is your, go to market marketing strategy? Are you growing through partnerships? Are you growing through content? Are you growing through ads? So basically condense your marketing strategy down to your ideal customer competitive advantage, proven process and results g guarantee.

For example, at LifterLMS, our ideal customer. Is a a WordPress website freelancer or agency, or do it yourself site builder with at least two years of WordPress experience. Ideally they have four plus years of WordPress experience. They’re polite, they’re successful with their courses or their clients are very successful.

Then what’s your competitive advantage? What makes you unique? We’re entering a world of AI disruption, and I can’t impress upon you enough how important it is to know what your competitive advantage is as a human and not just the information. Because artificial intelligence is making information more of a commodity, in that light, for example, coaching, like going beyond the content and helping people when they’re stuck in their unique personal situation. Having that human connection even through the internet is an extreme competitive example. And then what’s your proven process? Do you like how do you get customers, how well, how do you get leads?

How do you get customers? After they become a customer, how do you make them successful so that they love what you do and refer their friends? And then what’s your guarantee? See, this is part of the benefit of planning. Some people get nervous about a guarantee when they have an offer because it feels I can’t really offer a really strong guarantee because it’s up to the student or the customer to do the work and get the results.

If you’re really good at what you do and you’re really good at qualifying the people that come in that you allow to purchase from you, you can put out a really strong guarantee, like I’m talking about a hundred percent of your money back after X amount of time, like Dr. Dream a little bit. A guarantee can be a very strong sales tool, but more importantly than helping with conversions, when you think about a guarantee and construct it.

What you’re doing is really putting your money where your mouth is in terms of what your online education is all about, and your confidence in the offer that you’re offering. And then, you’ve done the 10 year vision, you’re exploring your unique mechanism, which is where we’ve been about how you do, what you do, how it works, what’s the process, but dial it back to three years.

What’s your three year vision? 10 years feels really hard. But in three years that should be easier. Do you wanna be making a million dollars, $10 million? Do you wanna have a thousand customers? 10,000, a hundred thousand customers or clients? What is your vision for three years?

What do you want to have ac have accomplished in three years? Do you wanna have a signature course that just sells like hotcakes that you make better and better year after year. Do you wanna have a huge membership library of training? Do you wanna have this really strong coaching model with other coaches working inside your education company, helping people get results?

What do you want? What are dream a little bit, think about those three year desired outcomes and accomplishments. Then dial it back again to your one year plan. So now this should feel more approachable. One of the reasons we do the 10 year and the three year is we wanna dial it back to think.

All right, cool. I have these big goals. ’cause what you don’t want to do is you don’t wanna put a 10 year goal and a one year plan. Everything is just, all of it is unreasonable and unlikely. Unlikely to be accomplished, but it’s important to dream big at the multi-year, 10 year, three year level, so that you can come up with a reasonable and strategic one year vision.

So think about that. What are the revenue targets in one year? What are the key projects? Now we’re getting more into tactics. What constraints do you wanna remove? What friction do you wanna remove? And more importantly than anything is what are you not gonna do, even if it’s considered good advice?

What are you just not gonna focus on the first year? Like your anti goal list, even if you want to get to it to achieve your 10 year vision, but not this year? Think about that. So once we get past, 10 year, three year, one year, we start getting into quarterly planning, and this is where this should feel relaxing.

The more tighter the focus gets because you get more control, the closer in time you are to what’s coming up. So when you do an annual plan, in this case for 2026. We’re ultimately gonna end up looking really hard at quarter one of 2026. So I like to do themes per quarter. So what theme do you want to focus on to achieve your one year goal in quarter one?

So in your accomplishments from your one year plan, let’s say you wanted to, you had four goals like. Get over a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, launch five courses develop like a coaching system. And the other one was to come up with a template library. So it’s not just about content, it’s also about this awesome value packed resource library you have that’s part of your membership.

I’m just making these up as an example. The cool thing about quarterly planning is you don’t have to do all those all at once and multitask and simul simultaneously work on them. So let’s prioritize like what is the theme for the quarter? Maybe you have a theme of we’re going all in on YouTube, or we’re gonna go all in on AI to accelerate our business, or we’re gonna focus on our website.

Conversions in quarter one. So you can, you don’t have to do ’em all at once. In fact, it’s super dangerous to try to do too much all at once. So like within the theme, like what are the key projects? So if we choose the YouTube theme as an example for quarter one, that can mean a lot of things. That can mean.

We’re gonna start a weekly live stream to attract new clients. We’re gonna hire a designer to improve our YouTube thumbnails. We’re going to upgrade our video and audio and editing equipment. We’re going to do brand collaborations with other YouTubers. So you start figuring out your key projects.

Which is super important. And then once you’re in your key projects it’s important to think of not always just doing brand new things. What do we want to amplify that’s already working? Let’s say we already have a YouTube channel and we see that, content about this.

Subtopic within our niche does really well. Let’s do more of that and get more exposure on YouTube as a, and then, like if we haven’t done live streaming before, that’s like a new project. So I recommend actually amplifying what you’re already doing well at a greater percentage to adding new projects.

So if I had to pick three things for YouTube as an example, I might remake. Some of our oldest top performing content for modern times, that would be a project. Another one would be doing collaborations with other YouTubers, which we’ve been doing, but do more of that. So those are amplifications, whereas like doing YouTube ads, that’s a new thing.

So I might do that as like a new project. The other thing that is part of planning is removing problems or constraints. So what’s constraining you in your business and how can you remove that bottleneck? So sometimes projects are not about necessarily brand new things. It’s about removing things that aren’t serving you anymore.

So if we keep going with this YouTube example, let’s say you don’t have a strong home office set up for creating videos and audios and things like that. So you wanna remove the constraint of always having to do all this setup to make a decent video so that you can just step into your office.

I can turn everything on and I’m ready to roll to make a high quality video. So you’re removing a constraint of. Time to create a high quality video, which then furthers furthers your goal. And then what do you wanna stop doing or not do? So maybe you’ve been, let’s say, blogging every day and doing a ton of social media every day.

But in order to do more YouTube. You might need to reduce those things. So let’s say you move your blogging to once a week or once every two weeks. And in terms of social media, maybe you just take a temporary break from one of your social media channels or find somebody to help so that you don’t have to do it as much, or, just choose to discontinue a social media channel that you’ve been working for a long time that is not yielding any results. So turning things off is just as important as turning things on. So another part of annual planning is developing the business. So I like to say we’re really making two products.

There’s like our education company offer, whether that’s a course, a coaching program, a membership site, or whatever it is. But the other product we’re making is our business and our business product is comprised of people and processes and technology. So that whole like business product. What do we want to do there?

And particularly what I want to focus on is the people aspect. So maybe you’re listening to this and you’re a solopreneur, but maybe you have, you occasionally work with freelancers or maybe you have a team or even have a giant team. So even if you’re a solopreneur. Creating your organizational chart is a very important part of the annual planning system.

And this doesn’t need to be fancy. You don’t need like a org chart software or have to even create something fancy and Google Sheets or Excel or whatever. But put down like the key functions of the business. The way I divide up an organizational chart is. It comes with seven areas. So those seven areas are product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations, and admin customer success.

And then we have the CEO or the leadership role under those, each of those. So if you’re doing it low tech, you can literally do it on a Google document with each of those, and then you put bullet points under those. And the bullet points are like breaking out the functions. So as an example, like under engineering or tech as an example, we might have who’s in charge of the website?

Who’s in charge of customizing lifter LMS to meet the needs. Who’s in charge of the hosting, who’s in charge of the marketing automation as an example, and if, and then you put people’s names by it. You really, you just build out your org charts so that each key function and functions within that function has one name next to it.

If you’re a solopreneur. Your name will be everywhere. But the reason it’s an important exercise to do this even as a solopreneur, is that you can start seeing where you want to get help first. Like perhaps it’s under the CEO role. Perhaps you wanna hire a virtual assistant to help you first. That could be, but when you do that, you’ll start to see I like being a CEO. I like being a leader. I’m spending a lot of time here, but I also need to spend time over here in marketing or in sales, or on product, or on engineering or customer success, all these things. And you can start to see where there’s a gap.

So part of your annual quarterly planning or 10 year vision, it’s about people. It’s about the business product. What kind of organization do you want to have? What seats need to be filled? What are, what is the personality of those people that you want in those places? So that’s a accountability chart.

The next thing is to develop a conscious artificial intelligence plan. We’re being. Disrupted as a society, just like when the internet became a thing by artificial intelligence. So think about that. When you’re doing your 10 year vision or your three year vision, or setting your annually plan, annual plan, or working on a quarter, start thinking about how will AI be involved?

How do we wanna leverage ai? Even if you don’t know like the tool you want or whatever. If we go back to our YouTube example. We might wanna figure out how to do better video editing using ai. I’ll tell you the answer right now. Get the script. Script is an awesome AI powered video editing tool. It can make shorts for you.

If you’re watching a clip of this on YouTube. It was made with the script very quickly. It can remove filler words and gaps and all kinds of stuff, what’s your plan for ai, for content creation, for coaching, for marketing, for developing ads, for making your videos better for doing research?

What’s your plan like or what do you need? And even if you don’t know the answer, that’s fine but come up with the question, how can I use artificial intelligence to help me? Be a better YouTuber. Bring that question to ai. Dream a little bit, talk to AI a little bit and think about that one. And the final thing I’ll mention, and by the way, I’ll say it again, I mentioned it earlier, the annual planning system that I use is free on the Lifter LMS Academy.

If you go to academy dot lifter lms.com and look for the annual planning system course. Enroll in that you can get the template I use that I use every year to work on my annual plan. And the cool thing is once you’ve done it once and you come back to do it again the next year, you might have a few updates to your 10 year vision.

Maybe you’re moving faster or slower in certain areas, so this gets easier the more you use an annual planning system. The last most important part is that you are a human in business. So what personal development goals do you wanna set for yourself? Maybe it has to do around your productivity or when you wake up, or how stressed you are, or your work life balance or your ability to communicate public speaking your personal relationships outside of work, whatever it is.

Doing an annual plan, I highly encourage you to incorporate personal development so that you become a better person in the process, not just have a better, more profitable, impactful business. ’cause those things work really well together. So planning is a practice, it’s not an event. It’s all about progress over perfection.

And. When you really commit to annual planning and give yourself permission to not be perfect, and sometimes you won’t hit your targets. Sometimes you will overshoot your targets and that’s great, but it’s a work in progress. It’s a way of being in the world of operating with a plan. It’s like the military.

If you think about an elite operating unit, the Navy Seals or the Army Rangers they have plans all the time. They’re really good at planning, but then when they hit the ground and the stuff goes off, they have to adapt on the fly. And you have to do that in business and in life as well. But planning is really important.

And the process of planning, the act planning even if the world doesn’t go exactly according to plan. Your odds of success are gonna be so much higher. You’re gonna be so much more clear, less stressed, adaptable. So I would encourage you to develop your annual plan. Head on over to the lifter LMS Academy, find the free annual planning system course.

Fill out the document. You copy it, you put it into your. If Google Drive or download it and upload it to whatever WordPress processor you use and work on your annual plan, it will change your life.

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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Marcus Carter from Carter School of English returns in this episode of LMScast to provide a detailed look at how he turned decades of conventional English instruction into a scalable online learning company driven by LifterLMS and WordPress. Marcus, who has taught for more than 30 years, describes how the COVID epidemic compelled him to switch from traditional language schools to virtual ones. His tentative TikTok videos and lack of camera confidence eventually developed into a powerful social media presence, which helped him see the possibilities of digital courses as a long-term business strategy.

He distinguished himself in a competitive market by concentrating on his proficiency in phonetics and multilingual instruction for Spanish speakers. Marcus also discusses how, after months of trial and error and sluggish early development, YouTube turned out to be his most successful growth and sales channel.

One little alteration to a thumbnail served as the catalyst for a breakout video that has already amassed millions of views after more than 160 films were uploaded before gaining significant popularity. From there, he was able to create a devoted worldwide audience by using YouTube to easily integrate content with course sales through straightforward links and weekly live sessions. Marcus highlights his open, trust-first approach to marketing throughout the discussion, providing prospective students with thorough walkthroughs of his courses rather than depending only on exaggerated claims.

He talks on how producing top-notch courses takes a lot of time and effort often nearly a year each course and why having several revenue streams such as YouTube, teaching, sponsors, and digital goods is crucial for long-term viability. Marcus concludes by discussing how he is now utilizing AI to make language learning more dynamic and interesting, continuing to push the limits of LifterLMS’s capabilities while producing significant results for students worldwide.

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

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

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

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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. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Marcus Carter. He’s from Carter’s school of english.com, the Carter Method. And Marcus, what this episode is primarily gonna be about is how he’s figured out to make online language learning more engaging, more effective, more interactive, how to push the boundaries with WordPress Lifter LMS using AI to help.

This is gonna be super fascinating, but first, welcome to the show, Marcus. 

Marcus Carter: Thanks very much, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here. Be here. 

Chris Badgett: I’m real excited you’re here. And for those of you who are listening via podcast a little later in the show where Marcus is actually gonna get into screen sharing. So if you wanna see what we’re talking about, go to the lifter, LMS YouTube channel.

And find this episode. If you type in LMS cast Marcus Carter, you’ll find it. And if you have the ability to switch over to the YouTube while you’re listening right now, I’d recommend doing that. But first, Marcus, let’s give a little context. Tell us about the Carter School of english.com. Just bring us up to speed on what it is, how long it’s been running, and your brand and your approach, and what your mission is and what’s going on.

Marcus Carter: Okay I’ve been teaching English for the last 30 years and up until COVID the Pandemic I had my own language schools and we were all obviously, in different places and in different towns. And then COVID hit and that all went to pot, basically. And we had to diversify a little bit, although we did continue online a little bit with our students for a couple of years, but I could see that it was going downhill pretty quickly.

And so I. My wife convinced me to start uploading TikTok videos and super embarrassed at the beginning. I had no camera confidence at all, or even though I’ve spent years and years in front of people, I couldn’t speak to a camera. In fact, my first videos was like with a cartoon head you couldn’t even see my face.

And anyway, I kept going and eventually got a bit of traction on TikTok and managed to get lots of followers there. And trying to work out how I could monetize all of these people that were following me. I started opening telegram groups for people for free, but most people were on it for like the free ride.

There wasn’t much conversion there, and I didn’t actually have anything to sell. I was trying to get people into the online courses, that we were doing. And that was the time when I started thinking about, Hey, maybe a digital course would be something that I could sell to these people.

That’s when I discovered lifter LMS and that’s when I set up my first course, which was within the. The context of English teaching. I’m also a writer. I’ve written like nine or 10 textbooks but I’m also very focused on phonetics. I consider myself an expert in phonetics. I’m also bilingual in Spanish.

I’ve got certain things going for me on social media that maybe other teachers don’t necessarily have, and that gave me a niche that I managed to fill and became quite popular. And I transitioned from TikTok over to Instagram, still trying to work it out how I could sell courses. It was pretty slow at the beginning because I, it was, it was, everything was new to me and I didn’t really know how to, bring the people to the courses to do webinars and those kind of things.

That all was a kind of learning curve for me. And then from there, I always had in the back of my mind, I loved watching videos on YouTube and I always thought, I’d love to be a YouTuber, but I didn’t wanna transition over to YouTube because I knew that the editing process was gonna be so much more laborious than what it was on these social media platforms.

But I thought, I decided one day, that I was gonna be a YouTuber and started uploading to YouTube and took me 164 videos before I got one of my videos. And it was actually very funny because it was one of my videos that I uploaded, I had uploaded eight months previously. And I was just looking through my videos and I thought, I’m gonna change the background in that video in the little thumbnail.

I literally changed the background and even today, like three years later, it’s still my best performing video. It’s crazy how something like that can completely change your life, because from there, obviously it’s so much easier. In YouTube, you’ve got your links for your digital course into your website.

Under the videos, people just start clicking in and you’ve got hundreds of, that’s, that video’s got over 2 million views now. And that’s where I transitioned into then starting to earn money from the platform of YouTube and starting to sell my digital courses.

And I started with the phonetics course, which was my original one. Then I did a basic course for beginners, and then a year ago I launched an intermediate course, and just a couple of weeks ago I launched my Between basic and intermediate, which is my latest product, which is based on ai. 

Chris Badgett: Wow, this is cool.

And before we get into what you figured out with your recent courses on how to make them more effective a couple quick clarifying questions. Do you do any like instructor led training on Zoom or it’s all kind of self-paced within the LMS? 

Marcus Carter: I had, I’ve had everything. I had cohort, I had a, like a Saturday group, but there were like 40, 50 people coming every Saturday.

It’s pretty difficult with English because everybody’s at a different level. So I always had to invent like global concepts that I could teach to people. That’s where phonetics is great because phonetics is, there is no level in phonetics of in English. It’s not like the vocabulary or the grammar that you have to be a bit more advanced.

So I was focusing heavily on, on phonetics and just putting sort of global vocabulary. And so I did have the cohort, I was using my lifter LMS platform for that every Saturday for three years straight. And that was very successful. Had lots of students in those classes. That went very well. I do still teach online too.

Now I, because I’ve got more limited time, I only teach private classes to high level executives for for those reasons that I don’t have much time and to do groups and things. I still have a couple of teachers that work for me, two or three teachers. And, but my main focus is now on, I just love creating digital courses.

I just, it’s just so much fun doing that. And obviously the YouTube channel, I have to keep that going. So I’m live every Saturday at seven o’clock, always on, on YouTube, and I always have a good community of people that come there expecting my classes. And it’s really nice to, they’re all there before me, chatting to each other and, things.

And yeah, I’ve tried to create a nice community in YouTube, which that’s what I use to, to boost, the sales and to promote the courses while I’m live or in my videos. 

Chris Badgett: Quick question just tactically, like what’s your advice to somebody who’s, using YouTube as a marketing channel?

You got like a link below the video and the description, but how do you, how does the actual conversion to sale happen? Is it pretty straightforward and that they click on the link and they’re like, yep, that looks good. Price looks good. I’m in. Is there any other kind of sales motion involved there?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, basically I’m probably not the, I’m, I could probably sell a lot more than I actually do, but basically all I have under my videos, whenever I’m live, the first thing I do when I’m live on YouTube is just say, before we jump into the class, just remember that the links are below to all my courses and I always have the one, the most recent course at the top.

And another thing I have is a a WhatsApp number as well, business WhatsApp number. So people can click on that and directly send a WhatsApp. And I personally answer those those messages. So that’s a kind of good way to get some more, personal engagement from from me. People are quite shocked sometimes when I answer with an audio and I say, it’s you.

And I said, yeah, it’s me. Don’t worry. And so yeah, I think that’s a good, and I also have a little WhatsApp logo on my website too. WhatsApp, I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s a plugin for WordPress where people can just click that on any of the pages and they directly send me a WhatsApp and I answer that too.

So I think that’s that’s important because people always have a lot of questions about, when they’re gonna buy a digital course. And another thing I’ve done for the last two courses that I launched, so a lot of people are selling digital courses online. Obviously when you go onto their landing pages, it’s full of promises and you’re gonna learn this, you’re gonna do that, blah, blah, blah.

This is what’s inside the course, click to buy, but. You are, you’ve just gotta trust what that person is saying is true on that website. And I’m probably not a very good salesman, but I am a very transparent, honest person. And so what I did in my previous, not this latest course, this latest course too, but the previous one is I filmed a, I had a webinar where I brought everybody in to launch this course and I showed them everything that’s inside the course.

Every little detail about what it was all about. And you click here and these are the audio, and then you listen to this and these are the videos and blah, blah, blah. And then that’s on my website. So anybody that goes to my, to the page to buy that course, it’s like a 45 minute video. You know exactly what you’re buying before you buy it.

And I did exactly the same thing with this course that I just launched as well. So I’ve got that, and I think that’s important because a lot of people have said to me in comments that it, things don’t live up to their expectations. That a lot of people are sending courses.

I’ve tried to do this one, I’ve tried to do that one, and then, I’m so pleased that I can actually see what I’m buying before I actually get it. And if you are, if you’re a quality content creator and your course is quality, why not? Don’t be afraid, in my opinion, that your competitors are gonna be looking at your courses and thinking, oh, that’s a good idea.

Fair enough. It’s worth the comp. Probably not many competitors are looking at my courses anyway, but I would prefer to be so open and to say I’ve created something that I know is quality. There it is. Have a look and if you’re interested, you just buy it. 

Chris Badgett: I love that approach.

The, it’s, I would call it like in marketing, I’d call it like a video sales letter, but it’s not a bunch of promises in this. It’s Hey, here’s what’s in the box. Here’s how this works. This is exactly what you’re gonna see. Like we’re removing all the mystery. Come on in. If this sounds like a good fit to you, it’s awesome.

Marcus Carter: You go and buy an iPhone and you’re standing there in the i in the iPhone store, and you’re testing it before you know what it’s all about before you buy it. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s brilliant. That’s my approach. Can you get into just a little bit of if we take a snapshot of today just the impact you’re having, like things like whatever you’re comfortable sharing, number of students you’ve mentioned it’s become like your full-time income stream.

Now you’ve mentioned, I’m curious like when you’re teaching English to Spanish speakers, like what parts of the world are you hitting and who’s, and also. Do you have any stories about how people have gone through the Carter method and got some job or some outcome? I’m sure you have all that stuff, but can you just tell us, inspire us a little bit with the impact of the site?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Obviously when you, the digital, the last digital course I just created, it took me 11 months to create this course, and the previous one before that, it took me a year to, to create that. So you’re I’m it’s not my full source of all income. Obviously I’m, I’m teaching and I had sponsors also on the website, and YouTube obviously pays me.

So I’ve got, MSI, multiple sources of income. I think that’s important for any kind of content creator to, open your. Possible sort of income sources so that if one isn’t doing too well, you’ve got another one. And you can more or less keep going. And so I know it’s difficult to spend a year creating a course, and not have any income at all for that course.

And you don’t even know if you’re gonna sell it when you get to the end of it. ’cause you are, you’re reaching a stage. You’re gonna try and do a webinar, you’re gonna try and bring people in, and then hopefully you’re gonna buy it. And then obviously from that moment onwards, it’s just a passive income that you are getting.

And I don’t know how many students I have, hundreds of students that have bought my digital courses. Definitely, maybe, probably 300, 400 I dunno how many exactly. I’ve sold. But the important thing for me is to always be have, they all have their separate telegram groups.

I’m in all those groups. I answer everything as. Quickly and as detailed as possible, anything they need to know, because they’re asking me questions about English. And what about, how do you pronounce this word? Audio message is to have a lot of close contact with the students after they have bought the courses, which then brings them into, a close field of contact with me to build up trust.

Because at the end of the day, when people, a lot of people come into the, to the webinar one thing I must say, when I do my webinars to sell the courses, the launches, I’ve actually only done about three or four launches. The last two were the most successful ones. The typical webinar that people are advertising come to the webinar and we’re gonna teach you this and blah, blah, blah.

So a lot of the time it’s using Facebook ads or YouTube ads or something, and you click on that and you sign up for the webinar. You might not even know that person. So what I did is I. Told people in the, I did YouTube ads in the last one, but I told people in the ad, I said, Hey, are you interested in seeing a new English course that I’m just about to launch?

It’s this kind of level or whatever. I didn’t say come to the webinar, which is another strategy I tried three years ago where people came, I gave them this webinar about phonetics. I was teaching them things and that, you’re gonna get a load of value and then here comes the sting in the tail.

I wanna sell you something at the end of it. And that is the typical pattern of webinars that me as a, not as a salesman I don’t feel comfortable hooking people in and then trying to, get that sale at the end and say, I’ve given you that value. You owe me, some of you owe me a sale now at the end, so everybody that came to that webinar, they knew why they were coming.

They were coming to see the presentation of a new course and. Almost all of them knew who I was. ‘Cause I’ve got, I dunno, 300,000 followers on, on, on YouTube. If they didn’t know me, they probably would’ve clicked on and seen my videos and things anyway. So I don’t have to prove that I’m an authority, which is what a lot of people have to do in these webinars.

Say, look, I’m this person. These are all the testimonials I have from other people that have bought my courses. Look how great I am. I just said, look, this is who I am and this is why you are here. And so whoever was there to see a presentation of a course and they knew that I was gonna sell it that day.

And that makes me feel super comfortable when I’m in these webinars. And I don’t have to like, start getting a lump in my throat when the sale’s coming up and then, all of a sudden come out with a price. But it’s a bit lower today because, and all of these things. I was just very comfortable.

So I’ve probably sidetracked a bit from your original question. 

Chris Badgett: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Just the piece I was looking for on the reach which. Spanish speaking countries. If you have 300,000 views on YouTube, you’re probably hitting all of them, I’m guessing, but Totally. 

Marcus Carter: Yeah. It’s primarily Spain USA, Mexico, Columbia, but it’s just all of them, everywhere really.

And I got a lot of people in, Australia and things because they’re just, Spanish speakers who have, gone to other countries to live and they need to brush up on their English. So yeah, it’s just wherever the algorithm takes me. 

Chris Badgett: And just one more question before we get into our screen share.

I’ve noticed I’ve seen patterns, ’cause I’ve worked with a lot of course creators and ones like you that are just crushing it and moving it multi-year in. I noticed three things. One of ’em is they’ve already got some experience with WordPress, like maybe a couple years before they get into it.

The big one is. They’ve already been making money with this expertise probably in the offline world. Like for you, you said you’ve been teaching English for 30 years, so you’ve been in the space a while. And then the most interesting one is you people take forward imperfect action and just keep going.

You’ve played around and experimented across social media. You’ve gotten better, better at tech. You’re implementing with ai. You get in the weeds sometimes and you get tech support or get help from AI or just mess around until you figure it out. You try a lot of tools. I’ve just seen this movie before, but is there anything else you would add to even if it’s motivation related, like why do you think you’ve been successful here, besides those factors that I mentioned?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Don’t have a plan B. That’s probably number one thing I would say. When I, yeah, when I closed the academies, all like the furniture, I had three schools all that furniture went into storage. And I still had, receptionists that was still working for me, but they didn’t really have anything to do.

And I, we had five at the beginning, we had to get rid of some of them. There was just two left at the end and they were like, okay, Marcus, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna reopen the schools and take all that stuff out. And I was like. No, we’re not gonna do that. I was like, Hernan te, like I’m burning the boats and I donated all the furniture to some local schools, and I said, we’re going digital 100%.

And I, and it was just like, there is no plan B. These digital courses have to work. Yeah. And when you’re, when you find yourself in that corner, you’ve got no other option than to make it work. And that is when, you kick into overdrive. And I love what I do. I love my studio. I love coming in here.

I love creating content. I love tech. I’ve always loved tech since I had my, Zi X Spectrum, 81 in my bedroom, when I was a kid and things. So I’ve always loved that side of things. What was difficult for me was the camera confidence, and being natural on camera. But, it’s just press record, just keep going.

It just, and just, there is no. Escape. You just gotta keep going in that direction and eventually you will get there. And if you are, if you’re struggling, and it’s you’re in a specialist niche, keep learning all the time. Just keep learning and learning, looking at other creators and try taking something from there.

Put your spin on it and just keep, because you can have the best course in the world, but the biggest problem, or the best I, telephone in the world or whatever product the number one pro problem for every creator or any kind of product or service is, how do I put that product in front of the people that are gonna buy it?

I could have a physical shop, that’s one way of doing it. But if you’re online, like most of us now. How do you get it in front of those people? And so you can pay your Facebook ads, your YouTube ads, but then you are somebody that isn’t, you don’t have an authority channel where people can say, oh, okay, this guy, all right, let’s click on here.

Okay, he’s, he must be good ’cause you’ve got 300,000 followers or something like that. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good just ’cause you’ve got that. But and so organic reach for me has been the number one way to, to reach people and to create that authority and that community by just keep going and going.

And, as I say, 164 videos on YouTube before, I remember my first check from YouTube was like $2 36 cents, like two years in. But for me, it was like I said to my wife, I said, I’m just so happy that I’ve monetized the channel. Finally people are coming to the channel. But it, because it was just, I’m like that kind of terminator mentality.

It’s just, I will not stop. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Marcus has already dropped a ton of gold and he’s got a YouTube play button behind him. I don’t have a YouTube play button. I’m looking I’m taking notes on these YouTube tips. But another thing about the great course creators is this not just about having a great website and making the sale and figuring out your marketing channel.

You actually have to deliver, quality, engaging, effective learning content. And Marcus is gonna take us on a tour, some of the stuff he is done with his latest course to inspire. If you’re listening, go find the YouTube version of this LMS cast with Marcus Carter. I’m gonna pop your screen up here, Marcus, and just.

Can’t wait to see the show and tell here. So it’s it’s up in the window. 

Marcus Carter: All right. Okay. So what you were saying just then about having a great website. I don’t have a great website. That’s one of the things I gotta work on a bit more. I’ll actually show you my my, I was just like fiddling it.

It’s not a great website, it’s just a basic elemental website that I’ve created here. It’s nothing special at all. And I need to improve it. I know I do. ’cause that’s my son keeps telling me, dad, you gotta get this website sorted out. But even that doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, it’s not about, I don’t think it’s about the website, it’s about the landing page.

It’s the link that goes from wherever you are. If you’re in TikTok, in Instagram, YouTube, whatever, that people land on that page and that page is well explained. I’ll just show you for example, what I was explaining before, so this is Genesis is the name of the new course, and this is the landing page for Genesis that I just recently created.

Here is the video where I explain the course in detail inside, I streamed it on YouTube live at the same time. I was doing it on Zoom. And so that’s the first thing people find. And it’s just a basic basic web, a basic page that goes down here with your buttons. One thing I’ve created here is I’ve got four courses now.

A lot of people like to buy bundles, and that’s when I use the memberships obviously in lifter MS. And so here you can say, okay, I want the basic course, gives you the price there, and I want to add it to Genesis. It’s telling me this is in Spanish, but it’s telling me how much I’m saving down here and I want to add this one too.

Or I can have all four. So making things easy, as easy as possible for people to be able to upsell very easily. I always, whatever, this is my, my phonetics course is the one on the right here, pro Speech, so that’s 249 euros, about $280. But if you buy that course with any of the others, it’s only a hundred dollars more.

So I always, when people contact me, I say, buy the phonetics course. You need to add that to any of the others. And it’s just, it’s almost standard now that people buy the package of Genesis Plus Pro speech or Intermediate plus Pro speech or Basic plus Pro speech. Yeah. As I say, my website’s nothing, nothing special at all.

It’s just a basic thing that I throw together and I keep every course seems to have a different theme. So as you can see, this one here is kinda like purple, I dunno why. But the other ones are like orange and green and things like that. So I show you that now how I’ve changed the colors and that’s one of the problems because really my logo is blue and white and my, sun keeps telling me that I should keep the same colors and things like that.

But let’s go into my area where my courses are. So what I just wanna 

Chris Badgett: add while you’re pulling that up, I’ve seen this movie before too, where it’s the offer and the training. Like we can get really obsessed with web design, but when you have the right offer for the right people and you’re good at what you do, like the design, while important and a website can always be improved.

It’s the offer that matters. And you nailed it. And I think, by the way, that’s a beautiful landing page that you were just showing us.

Marcus Carter: Okay, thanks. Yeah, but even looking here, my courses, like the basic course doesn’t have a background, the intermediate course, that was, I’m looking at it now, I’m thinking, why didn’t you just do them the same?

But these are just things that I overlook, as a creator or genesis. I just threw this together ’cause I didn’t have a featured image for the Genesis course, but I’ll show you, for example the intermediate course, which is the course that I launched a year ago.

And this is when I started going a little bit higher in my technological skills as far as the course is concerned. So I’ve got all my modules here. There’s 63 lessons in this course 10 modules, and they all have like evaluations at the end of every module. So if I just click into to lesson one.

Each. Listen all my videos are based on videos and this is why this course took so, so long. ’cause there’s 63 videos that I had to edit, which took me an eternity to do that. And I’ll explain the way I changed it in the next in the next.

The way I teach English basically is I have this is what the counter method is based on, is that there’s a set of vocabulary there and I introduce a word and then I immediately ask a question to the student. As you can see at the bottom here, it says, do you play chess? And what I do is I leave a gap here.

So yes, I play chess,

play. Do you play chess? So as you can see here, I ask a question, students are supposed to answer out loud, and then they compare their answer with mine. Yes, I play chess, or no, I. I don’t play chess. And so there are always what we call closed questions, which is a yes or no answer. They say it out loud, there’s no real interaction.

I’m just hoping that students are actually saying these answers out loud. Okay. That has worked very well up until now, but I wanted to change things for my new course. So after this part here there’s another series of audios. I’m keen 

AI: on going camping in summer 

Marcus Carter: for people to 

AI: camping 

Marcus Carter: people to listen to the audios here.

And then I used this is a plugin that I used here for some different kinds of exercises. You can put the cursor down here, see the translations. No. Okay. This is a pretty basic lesson. This is the first one. I actually got better as I was going along with this course. If I go into one of the more advanced lessons, I can show you how I advance, and let’s go up to here or something.

Chris Badgett: It’s funny how things. You start making something and you’re, that’s that continuous improvement. You just keep getting better. And it’s you can’t, you don’t always have time to go back. I’m not gonna reshoot everything.

Marcus Carter: Yeah, you could, you just gotta keep going here. I learned how to do these audios and put these in.

So that happened after about less than six or seven, but I didn’t go back to change the first ones ’cause there was a lot of work done there already. These, this, the one thing I should say for everybody listening, I’m not a coder, I know. Ha I just know like super basic things, like the and I could not write code myself at all.

Everything that you’re seeing here, all of this has been the help of chat GPT to be able to do these things. And so what you do need to, what I would definitely advise anybody is to become an expert on using chat GT on a daily basis or whatever AI you want to use. So I started putting, different kinds of, exercises in dragon drops and things like that you could do here. These are audios that you can play. She