The founder of Notion Mastery, Marie Poulin, knew she had caught lightning in a bottle once she started to get messages from people telling her they would pay real money if she released a course teaching Notion.

There were a number of challenges to work through before and after that point. Growing a dedicated audience while already running a business, getting through the first iterations of the course and figuring out what people needed and the best way to teach them, figuring out what to charge for the content, and hiring new people as the business grows.

Each of these topics comes with a lot of nuance, like how do you incentivize people to actually leave you feedback instead of just never showing up again? How would you go about growing an audience? How do you know when to hire someone? And how would you make sure that they're a good fit?

All these questions and more are answered in this episode of the Badass Courses podcast. Hear from Marie Poulin how she successfully started the business and used constant iteration through learner feedback to design the course!

Marie Poulin, founder of Notion Mastery, talks about how she successfully started the business and used constant iteration through learner feedback to design the course. 

Effectively Using Learner Feedback with Marie Poulin

Quincy Larson, founder of freeCodeCamp, was in his 30's after he quit his job as a school director. After learning how to automate some of the tedious tasks that staff had to deal with, he realized how many people's lives could be improved if they learned how to solve problems with technology.

He spent the next nine months learning to code before landing his first software engineering position. He gained a ton of practical experience on the job and started to think about how to create a path to get people to this point as quickly as possible.

freeCodeCamp was the result.

freeCodeCamp, using game design as its guiding instructional design philosophy, has learners coding with rapid feedback and frequent challenges or "mini bosses". The idea being that a learner can't iterate and improve to their max potential unless the feedback that corrects and guides them is immediate. The idea of the mini boss is to strengthen a learner's problem solving and stop them from getting too overconfident in their abilities.

**Coding is hard.**

And don't let anyone tell you different. Unless the learner understands just how frustrating and ambiguous programming is, they're going to hit a wall once they are confronted with a blank canvas. **Now what?**

**Iteration is critical to the platform as well.** Since freeCodeCamp is well, **free**, they are able to make changes freely without having to worry about wasting anyone's money. This gives them the freedom to get feedback, iterate and build something truly nice

Quincy goes over all of the above and more in this episode of the Badass Courses podcast. Tune in to learn more about the business model, course design, and history of freeCodeCamp.

Quincy Larson talks about freeCodeCamp's business model, course design, and history

Preparing Learners for the Blank Canvas with Quincy Larson

Ben Tossel created Makerpad, which seeks to teach that you don't need to spend years learning to code or spend 100s of thousands of dollars on expensive engineers to start a business.

A core part selling educational content online is that platform. Whether it's Youtube, a multi-million dollar site filled with custom functionality, or somewhere in-between, you'll need ways to share your content to your learners.

You can also avoid spending a lot of time and money on your platform by researching the UX other platforms have implemented and repurposing it for your own needs. They have already done the R&D so you don't have to. But, make sure that you are repurposing the features and making them your own and not just copying one-to-one. It's very important that you do not steal.

The point of all this is to say that you don't need to build something completely custom. It's tempting to think that you need something that can't be found anywhere else, but more than likely this part is used as a means of procrastination from actually launching a course.

**Shipping and iterating on your content comes first.**

No-code can take your business to the point of several million dollars of revenue even. When it comes time to build your platform, ask yourself what you actually need out of your app. More times than not there will be an existing solution!

Makerpad not only aims to teach no-code, it was also built with it. Learn more from its founder, Ben Tossel, how no-code can reduce costs and save time when starting an online business.

Build a Thriving Business without Custom Software with Ben Tossel

"You can't buy cameras and become a better photographer. You have to take pictures to become a better photographer."

Brennan Dunn says this when referring to his tendency for purchasing the **best** tools before even starting a new hobby. Equipment is no substitute for real experience.

Gathering real experience is critical when it comes to creating a recorded course. It will be **very** likely that you have gaps in your teaching if you go straight to recording your course and releasing it without getting any kind of feedback.

This is why Brennan likes to host live workshops when planning a recorded course. They're perfect for being able to immediately see where learners are getting stuck, what questions they're asking, and learn why they're trying to learn what you are teaching.

And while the personalized experience of live-content can be the most valuable to the learner, it does come with some tradeoffs. On your end, you lose time by having host the workshop consistently, and your reach is more limited to the amount of seats in the workshop. And for learners, they lose the ability to go back and reference the content of the workshop, and they also aren't able to learn at their own pace.

But, a lot goes into creating a course. And one of the more difficult decisions will be deciding on a platform. There are some significant disadvantages to using an existing platform. Weaker marketing features, inflexible payment models, and a rigid lesson first structure to your content.

All of this added up to Brennan deciding that he would build his own platform. He wanted to be able to take a learner first approach when designing the content, have teaser lessons in courses, and build better marketing pages. It was the right choice to make for what **he** needed.

And so remember, before jumping right into recording a course, try to teach in front of a live audience. You may be surprised on how much you might be missing. And, when you do finally have something solid, make sure to weigh your options when picking a platform. Making your own might be right for you depending on your content and marketing needs.


Brennan Dunn chats about the importance of getting experience, the benefits of hosting workshops before recording a course, and the reasons he decided to build his own course platform.

Integrating Live-Content in to Your Course Design Process with Brennan Dunn

Terrain was founded out of a frustration with the e-learning industry.

There are **a lot** of courses out there with great marketing but lack good learning environments, expertise, and instructional design. Eman Zabi set out to change that with Terrain. The idea was to create a platform with high quality vetted courses that are actionable and designed to actually get people to finish them.

A number of solutions were implemented by Terrain to ensure that all of its content is extremely high quality. They reach out to vetted creators, have them create an outline and write a script, and then Terrain has the script peer-reviewed by a diverse panel.

An excellent learning environment is another key feature of Terrain. Distractions are minimal and note taking is at the forefront of the design.

Terrain was built with no-code using the bubble.io platform, Circle for the community, and Zapier to handle all of the integrations. No-code was an excellent choice but came with its own unique challenges, such as Zapier not having a needed integration for example.

They've also taken a unique approach to marketing. Eman built a chrome extension that brings the learning environment from Terrain into Youtube, allowing the learning to stay within that optimal learning context. The extension and word of mouth have both been effective in bringing in new learners.

Eman Zabi chats about Terrain's process for producing great courses, building an excellent learning environment, and how the platform was built using no-code

Creating an Excellent Learning Environment with Eman Zabi

Designing a course isn't linear. And it makes sense, since learning itself isn't a linear activity!

We spend years building expertise and gaining knowledge, and concepts don't neatly build on each-other one after another. Our skills end up looking more like nodes on a graph with numerous edges connecting them all.

And Kyle Shevlin knows this well.

Sometimes ideas will live in his head for years before they develop into something more. And developing those ideas involves researching and learning the topic in his own ways.

Once things start to take shape it's important for Kyle to get things out quickly. With his MDX blog he's able to get out quality content for people in a short amount of time.

Getting things out quickly isn't just rushing. A better term would be **optimizing for completion**. Kyle is self aware of his own patterns and knows that what's best for him is to optimize for completion, and spend less time getting bogged down in making other aspects of the course perfect such as the marketing, or the pricing model.

And that's something that you should keep in mind after you've finished listening to his episode. Look back and think about previous projects that you may have left incomplete. Is there a pattern? Try to keep it in mind with the next thing you work on, and optimize for it!

In this episode, Kyle Shevlin discusses his philosophies of teaching and learning, as well as the technical details of building a platform and producing content. 

Designing Courses Nonlinearly with Kyle Shevlin

We can sort of categorize courses and other educational content into two different categories.

The first is a targeted instrumental style, where the learner is taught procedures and technical skills. It's important to learn these skills in whatever subject you are learning but this type of course lacks the greater context and can leave you wondering how everything fits together and where you'd actually apply these skills.

The second type operates on a higher level of concepts and patterns. It teaches the learner mental models and forms the context surrounding the skills of the domain.

It's necessary to learn from both types but you may notice that there are a lot more of the first type. And part of the reason for that is that it's a much more challenging instructional design problem. Both the delivery method and content of the course have to be different.

Which for Josh Kaufman this has meant building a custom platform for his Personal MBA course that he's designing. Some of the challenges have included reducing the cognitive overwhelm that comes with very large courses, structuring the course around a 1to1 asynchronous relationship with the instructor, and designing a system that has the learner revisiting content for spaced repetition.

All of that fits together to create an experience that is more likely to keep learners engaged through to completion and better reinforces the concepts being taught.

Josh Kaufman discusses designing courses that based around mental models instead of specific technical skills, and how he'd build a platform to support this style.

Designing Courses Around Mental Models with Josh Kaufman

If you've ever taken a course on the internet you may have come across an exercise or some kind example that just left you thinking

**okay but **why?****

This lack of real-world context is a problem that a lot of courses suffer from.  
Creating examples that are engaging learners, isolates the skill being used, while also showing off the context in which the skill is used takes time and expertise but the payoff is well worth it.

It's not just examples/exercises though. Creating an engaging environment to learn in is important. Angie Jones has a ton of advice in this episode and talks about what she did at Test Automation University to build that environment.

**The true goal of all this work is to improve the outcomes of your learners.** Making sure that you are giving them the means to succeed and stay committed to their learning goals on your platform.

If you stay true to this goal, you'll both improve the lives of your learners and the success of your business.

Angie Jones discusses creating good exercises, pulling in real world context into courses, and creating an overall engaging learning environment.

Engaging Learners with Practical Challenges with Angie Jones

As an independent educator you're going to end up wearing a lot of hats. Development, marketing, support, on top of the work that goes into actually producing the content. 

All of it is essential though if your goal is to actually reach people and help teach them something that's relevant to their goals.

A part of that is finding out what to actually teach. It can sometimes be a challenge finding something that is interesting to you but also relevant to the audience that you've grown. 

Jorge Vergara has found that it's very effective to ask your audience what they're working on and some of the problems they've been struggling with. Asking directly if they'd like a course on X subject might get you enthusiasm but it doesn't actually tell you what they __need__. 

The development side of things is huge too if you aren't outsourcing the platform. It can be very difficult to balance working on it with actually producing content, especially if you have a full-time job. 

There's more value to working on your platform than just setting up a place where learners can watch your videos. You have opportunities to work with and gain practical expertise on technology that you are wanting to teach. You also get full control of the learning experience.

**In the end, It really is up to you to weigh the trade-offs and decide what will work best for your needs.**


Jorge Vergara chats about the various jobs her performs as an independent educator

Balancing Platform Development and Content Creation with Jorge Vergara

Designing courses that are both entertaining and informative is no small feat. But, time and time again, Wes Bos delivers.

There's no secret formula either. The method is simple. Wes takes a project first approach, thinking about the technology he wants to teach and everything a learner would need to know in order to become skilled at it and dumping it all into a mind map.

From there he tries to build three to four different projects of different sizes, covering different areas. One might be heavy on the data, another may be focused on authentication and permissions. Then he reverse engineers his projects and asks questions, "what are the milestones? What are the things you need to learn? What can you build in a course scope?"

Beyond his courses Wes also has built his own platform and co-hosts the wonderful podcast Syntax.fm with Scott Tolinski. 

Building the platform himself was very important to Wes. It came from wanting to have a sense of credibility, and there just not being anything that had the features he wanted at the time. And it gives him an ongoing project to work on and continue to write production code.

The podcast has also been very successful in its own right. It has been excellent for selling courses and it makes money from sponsorships as well. 

So check out this episode of the Badass Courses podcast to get more insights from Wes Bos including, when he decided to hire employees, dealing with stolen content, managing aging content, and more!

Wes Bos chats about his course production process, when he decided to hire employees, dealing with theft, managing aging content, and more!

Creating a Successful Business with Fun Project-Based Courses with Wes Bos

If you are wanting to become and independent educator, you don't have to jump straight into trying to produce a recorded course.

Marissa Goldberg's approach has been to start as a service based business and then use the skills and knowledge that you gain there to transition into producing courses.

By doing it this way you can know exactly what problems people are facing, and you can refine your teaching style since you'll be able to get live feedback and see if people are seeing results in real time.

Marissa also chats about how she is able to effectively build a reputation without doing any kind of hustle culture style marketing, the problems people face when they are promoted from a skilled technical position into a management role, and how she made a sustainable transition into self-employment.

Marissa Goldberg chats about going with a service-based approach when starting her business, focusing on sustainability, and helping students have the environment they need to succeed. 

Starting Your Business as a Service Before Producing Courses with Marissa Goldberg

If your main interest is to actually get straight into producing content and start selling it, you probably don't want to jump into developing a custom platform. 

Mark Shust has seen many people get into building there own platforms and have all their time sucked into getting it running, when they could've been delivering a course. 

It can take much longer than you might expect. Over a year even depending on if you are working full-time or not. There's a ton of things that you'll have to deal with yourself such as payments, refunds, subscriptions, upgrades, authentication, streaming video, and more. 

Mark also chats about how he designs his courses by reverse-engineering projects, tax compliance, and how to look beyond what people are saying and figure out what they're needing.

Mark Shust chats about the advantages of using an existing platform, figuring out what content to produce, and designing courses by reverse engineering projects.

Using Existing Course Platforms to Deliver More Content with Mark Shust

Once you've got an idea for a course or some other kind of educational product, there are a number of steps you can take to make sure that it's a good idea and to refine the instructional design before you spend the time recording. 

Chris Biscardi uses multiple mediums to try out new ideas. A great starting point is Twitch since the format isn't expected to be as refined and there's more interaction between you and the viewers. 

Next you might consider recording a YouTube video or writing up a blog post. These are more refined but nearly the same level of commitment as a course. You'll also be able to gauge interest based on how people react to it. 

Not only will you be able to gauge interest, you'll also be to use the questions and feedback you might get to adjust the design of the course.

Chris also discusses creating good example projects, course maintenance, thinking about your content as various streams, and how he deals with people finding ways to access his paid content for free. 

Chris Biscardi chats about using multiple mediums to test content, creating good example projects, course maintenance, thinking about your content as various streams, and how he deals with people finding ways to access his paid content for free. 

Researching to Teach and Testing Your Ideas with Chris Biscardi

Making your courses engaging is always the goal, but it's something that's easier said than done. But, Josh Comeau has several strategies that he uses to ensure that his content is as engaging to learners as possible.

There's the element of active practice. A learner shouldn't be able to go through 100% of a course's content on their phone. Exercises are a great way to get the learner involved.  By giving the learner a chance to struggle with something you give them an opportunity to think about what they learned deeper, and potentially reach a lightbulb moment. 

Another technique Josh uses is to make his content multimodal, which is a fancy term for using multiple mediums. His lessons will have both written and video content so that learners switch gears and learn in different ways. 

Josh also discusses how it took him much longer than expected to build his custom platform, how he designs his courses with expanding bullet outlines, the maintenance he's done on his course, and how the strength of his following helped him launch the CSS for JS successfully.

Josh Comeau discusses how he designs highly engaging content, how it took him much longer than expected to build his custom platform, and how the strength of his following helped him launch the CSS for JS successfully.

Engaging Learners with a Chance to Struggle with Josh W. Comeau

Running a course platform that not only contains your content, but also the courses of several other third-party creators is an entirely different job than that of the independent creator.

Scott Tolinski, creator of Level Up tutorials has had to learn a lot of lessons as he grew his business and started bringing on guests instructors. The amount of coordination and planning required was a lot. But, they decided to hire a developer who did an amazing job setting up systems that made the flow of connecting with content creators much more manageable. 

A small team of people also work on Level Up and Scott has had to really learn management skills. Being able to have people take on some of the workload is a huge help and has allowed Scott to be able to focus on the work that he wants to do more of. 

Scott also chats more about what went into building the Level Up Tutorials platform, the essential features of a good course, and how he designs good project examples.

Scott Tolinski chats about what it's been like to grow his business and bring on more people, what went into building the Level Up Tutorials platform, the essential features of a good course, and how he designs good project examples.

Learning to Manage a Growing Business with Scott Tolinski

When you first start your business, the biggest initial hurdle is choosing where your content is going to be hosted. 

If you start building a custom platform from the beginning, it may be months before you ship a single course. And if you have a deadline and need to start making a profit this might not be the way to go. 

Making the decision to use an existing platform might be tough. Chances are it doesn't do exactly what you want it to. But, you are able to entirely focus on producing your content. And, you can always build something for yourself in the future. Tyler McGinnis went this route and it has really worked out for them!

Tyler also chats about compensating employees as a small bootstrapped startup, keeping the core value that they're an education business first and not a software shop, and how they've leaned into their niche and specialized their content. 

Tyler McGinnis chats starting with an existing platform before building something later, compensating employees as a small bootstrapped startup, keeping the core value that they're an education business first and not a software shop, and how they've leaned into their niche and specialized their content. 

Transitioning From Teachable to a Custom Platform with Tyler McGinnis

Creating a course about design has its own unique challenges.

Design is an art, but that doesn't mean it's not quantifiable. With some caveats of course, there are rules you can follow and techniques that you can use to produce designs that are going to look good. Kyle Gill aims to arm learners with these design principles so that they are able to identify what makes up good design and have the ability to produce their own.

Creating interactive examples is also an interesting challenge. In a course about design you probably shouldn't just throw your learners into code challenges, your audience might not just be developers! Kyle has created interactive design examples that animate from a bad design to an enhanced one.

Kyle also chats about the difficulties with measuring learner success, the criteria a good quality course, and the technology behind UI Foundations.

Kyle Gill chats about teaching the principles of design, the difficulties with measuring learner success, the criteria a good quality course, and the technology behind UI Foundations.

How UI Foundations Was Built to Teach Quality Design with Kyle Gill

Testing out your content in some way before a full release can really improve the quality of your final product. 

Matt D. Smith, better known around the internet as MDS, did a beta testing round before he released Shift Nudge. Learners still had to pay to access the beta, which resulted in a very invested group of testers. And, the course is hosted on Notion which gave learners the ability to leave feedback on content inline, and it was easy for Matt to make adjustments and even record new lessons. 

Releasing Shift Nudge was different than the other products Matt has launched. It's more personal, and it can feel like the content is a reflection of you that people will judge. But, the best advice Matt has received about that is that as an educator you are not a grand knowledge holder, bestowing your knowledge upon people. **Your job is to facilitate and guide people from the state of not knowing, to knowing.**

Matt also discusses the lessons learned from the errors he made with offering a design feedback service to learners, and how the idea for Shift Nudge went from being a product design course to a visual design course.

Matt D. Smith (MDS) chats about beta testing Shift Nudge, how launching a course was different than other products, the lessons learned from the errors he made with offering a design feedback service to learners, and how the idea for Shift Nudge went from being a product design course to a visual design course.

Facilitating Learning Over Bestowing Knowledge with Matt D. Smith (mds)

Online learning has so much potential to be vastly better than traditional in-person education. But, why do most courses miss the mark?

To Greg Róg it seems that most people are trying to create content instead of focusing on the actual action of teaching people. People make courses for themselves without consideration of who the audience is going to be. And, no thought seems to be put into the structure and design of the course itself. 

The instructor must be engaged in not only teaching people, but in the design of their course experience. To Greg, that engagement is the key element that separates great courses from low-quality ones. 

Greg also chats about his learning style that has enabled him to be able to consume and understand nearly 1000 pages of material in only two weeks, how he's designed his platform, and how learning style shifts as you gain more knowledge.

Greg Róg chats about how engagement is the key to producing great courses, his learning style that has enabled him to be able to consume and understand nearly 1000 pages of material in only two weeks, how he's designed his platform, and how learning style shifts as you gain more knowledge.

Podcast Season One: Badass Course Builders

Episodes