Sell your knowledge online: what it takes now

Most practitioners have a box somewhere. Spare room, under the stairs, top of the wardrobe. Ring binders, a wallet of handouts photocopied for a workshop in 2014, a memory stick nobody has plugged in since, and the exercise book where you wrote down the questions people kept asking. That box has been a course for years. What has changed is what it costs to get it out of the box.

What is in the box

Take the binders first. Somebody who has been teaching for eight years has usually taught the same material in the same order more times than they can count, and that order's sitting in the binders, on dividers, in handwriting. Section one, then section two, then the bit everybody finds hard, then the bit that only makes sense once they have found the first bit hard. It took years of trial and error to arrive at, and you'd struggle to explain how you got there if somebody asked. And it's the single hardest part of building a course, which means the hardest part is already done and has been for a long time.

The handouts are lessons. Each one is a thing you explain out loud so often you could do it while making tea.

Then there's the exercise book, and this is the valuable one. Written in it, over years, are the questions people really ask: the same six or seven, in slightly different words, from nearly everybody. Somebody who has never taught your subject cannot guess those questions. They can research the topic, they can write a competent outline, and they'll still miss every single one, because the questions aren't in the literature, they are in the room. You could write them out from memory this afternoon. That is most of what a course is for. It's also why courses built by people who have never taught read like an encyclopedia entry with a price on it.

There's a laminated sheet in there too. There is always a laminated sheet.

So the material exists. It's on paper, in the wrong format, in an order only you can read, but it exists, and it doesn't exist for the person who decided last month to become an online educator. That head start is the one part of this nobody can buy.

Why it stayed shut

Three things kept the lid on, and all three were good reasons at the time.

The first was the bill. Software built for people running launches is priced for people running launches, and a monthly figure that makes sense against a marketing budget makes no sense at all against a box that's currently earning nothing. Paying a subscription for months in order to find out whether anybody wants the thing is a poor trade, and most people were right to refuse it.

The second was the typing. Even with the binders open on the table, turning them into something a stranger can follow alone is a fortnight of evenings, and it begins with the worst screen there is: an empty one with a cursor blinking in the corner.

The third was the tech, which is the one people are least likely to say out loud. Nothing in anybody's training covered file formats or upload settings, and the evening that vanishes into getting one video to play is a real evening that real people have lost.

While we're in the drawer: the memory stick is not a backup. Nobody has ever gone and looked for the memory stick. I've come round to thinking the reason we keep them is nothing to do with the files, it's that binning one feels like agreeing the workshop is over. Leave it where it is. It costs nothing to house.

What changed, and what did not

The bill changed. Ours is $47 a month, flat, with no tiers to decode, and we take nothing out of your sales beyond what Stripe charges to move the money. There's a 30-day free trial and it doesn't ask for a card, so finding out whether any of this suits you costs an evening rather than a decision.

The typing changed more than anything else here. You describe the course in a sentence or two, say how many sections and how many lessons you want and who it's for, and the first draft comes back in about ninety seconds: sections, lesson titles, and the words inside them.

What has not changed is the part everybody hopes has. Nobody finds a course because it exists. The draft that comes back is general and a bit bland and you'll rewrite most of it. And the second or third week is still where people go quiet, whatever software they are going quiet in.

None of this expires on Friday. There's no window closing and I'm not going to invent one to hurry you along. The case for this year rather than next is duller than that, and it's only this: the three walls that kept the box shut are all lower than they were, and the box gets a year older every year. The 2014 handouts mostly still hold. The ones from 2004 do not.

The afternoon

Four boxes. What the course is called, who it is for, how many sections, and how many lessons in each. That's the whole form.

Then a minute and a half of it working, and there's a course on the screen with its sections and its lessons in place. What comes back is a skeleton written in nobody's voice, and that's exactly what it's for. Rewriting somebody else's draft is a job you can do at nine in the evening with the television on. Facing an empty page is not.

The evening after that

This is where the exercise book comes up off the floor. Go through the generated lessons and put your own words in: the six questions everybody asks, the sentence you always say at the point where people get stuck, the story about the client in 2019 you tell every time because it lands every time.

Lessons take whatever your material already is. Text, video, audio, a PDF of the handout you've scanned somewhere, a quiz, an assignment you read and write feedback on. If there's a worksheet in the binder, it's a lesson by teatime.

If you're not sure which of the things you know should be the course in the first place, that's the earlier question and it has a page of its own. This one assumes the box has already settled it, which it usually has: the thing in the binders is the thing you have been teaching for years and stopped noticing.

One person, before anybody else

Don't launch it. Give it to one client you already have, for nothing, and watch what happens.

You'll see who opened what and where they stopped, and where somebody stops usually says more about the order than about them. Fix that, then give it to three more. This costs you nothing but a week, it's the only test that tells you anything true, and it's far kinder than finding out from a stranger who paid.

Leave it in the box if

• The work is your hands and your eyes. If what you do is watch a person and correct them, move the part that is the same for everybody and keep the rest in the room where it belongs.
• You want something that sells itself. It will not. A course is a thing you can sell; it isn't a thing that sells.
• The material is genuinely out of date and you know it. Rewriting the substance is a much bigger job than building the course, and no software on earth helps with it.
• You're two weeks out from a retreat, a move or a busy season. This wants one clear afternoon and two evenings. Book them before you start rather than hoping they turn up.

What it costs

$47 a month. One plan, no tiers: 1,000 active students, unlimited courses and products, hosted video with a terabyte of bandwidth a month, the AI builder, communities and chat. Extra bandwidth is $10 a terabyte on the rare occasion anybody needs it. We take no cut of your sales. Thirty days free to try it without handing over a card, and thirty days money back after that.

Justine Lette at Hypnosis New Zealand came to us paying over $100 a month elsewhere and using a fraction of it.

The box is already a course. It's been one for years. What sits between it and something people can log into is an afternoon and a couple of evenings, and that's a smaller gap than it was every other time you looked at it.