Nobody complained. Nobody asked for their money back. They went quiet, and you found out slowly.
The fourth Tuesday
You get to the hall at quarter past six because the badminton club always runs over. Ten mats down in two rows. Blocks and blankets against the radiator, the little speaker on a folding chair. It's a good class, and nothing in that hall tells you anything is wrong, because the people in the hall are the people who come.
The six-week course is the other thing. You recorded it over six weekends in the spring, put it up in January, and fourteen people bought it. That is the number you know. Four months later it is still the only number you know.
In the car park
Somebody catches you by the boot of the car while you're loading the blocks back in. She bought the course. She says it sideways, the way people do when they feel a bit caught out, that she's a little behind on the videos, and then she laughs and says she'll catch up when the school holidays come round.
You say of course, no rush, it's there whenever.
Then you drive home working out what "a little behind" means. One week, or all of it. And whether the four people who answer your emails are now the whole of it. You cannot ask them. Asking fourteen people how they're getting on is a fine thing to do once. Doing it every few weeks turns you into the person chasing them, and that is not what they bought.
What you'd be taking on
Worth saying early, so you can stop here if it isn't for you.
This is a course platform. It'll show you how far through your course each person has got and hand the weeks out one at a time instead of all at once. It won't take bookings for your Tuesday class, it won't run a timetable, and it isn't a marketing suite. You can point your own domain at your portal. What we do not offer is full white-label hosting, where every address a student sees is yours.
We have not measured whether any of this makes more people reach week six. Nobody here has run that number, and a percentage borrowed from somebody else's business would be worth nothing to you.
And there's real work in it. An evening to put a course you've already made into it, another evening to write the emails in your own words. Two evenings, roughly - but two evenings you're not currently spending on anything.
Back at the kitchen table, half nine
Kettle on, laptop open, and here's everything you have. A payment list from January with fourteen names on it. An email tool that can tell you how many people opened week three, which is not the same as how many watched it. A paper register from the hall with ticks in the first two columns and blanks after that, and that register is for the room, not the course. So you guess. You write a cheerful note to all fourteen asking how everyone's getting on, four people answer, and what you take from four answers isn't that people got busy in March. It is that the course was not good enough.
That is a very reasonable conclusion built out of almost no information, and it is the expensive part. Not the takings, which you already have. What it costs you is the next course: six weekends of recording, ten people who stopped watching, and you decide the online thing isn't for you and go back to hoping the hall fills. There's the second sale gone as well, because the people who finish are the people who ask about your retreat and tell somebody else.
The screen that would have told you in March
Everything from here is a version of finding out sooner.
You get a list of the people who have your course and how far through it each of them is. Lessons get marked complete as people work, and that shows up on your side. It isn't clever and it doesn't need setting up.
What that changes is the car park. You wouldn't be hearing "a little behind" for the first time. You'd have seen in March that four of them hadn't opened anything since the ninth, and written to those four then, which is a different message from a cheerful email to all fourteen.
Week by week, and emails you don't sit up writing on a Sunday
Two things help with the going quiet, and neither of them is you working out who to chase.
The first is letting the course out over time rather than handing over all six weeks on day one. Six weeks of material arriving at once looks like a mountain. One week arriving on a Monday looks like a class.
For what it's worth, I think six weeks is a room length rather than a screen length. In a hall, six Tuesdays is nothing - you turn up, it's an hour, it's in the diary, and the other people in the room are half the reason you go. Alone in a spare room, six weeks is a long promise to make to yourself about something nobody sees you doing. If I were building mine again I'd make it four and let people ask me for more. That's an opinion rather than a feature, and it argues against the thing you've already made, but it's what I'd do.
The second is the emails that go out with the weeks. You write them once, in your own voice, and they arrive on their own while you are doing something else.
An email won't make somebody unroll their mat. Sometimes life is simply louder than you are. But a note written for somebody in the middle of week three, that arrives when they get to week three, beats one cheerful email to fourteen people who are all in different places.
Something in the diary they can turn up to
The other reliable thing is a fixed point. A live session every couple of weeks where people can see you, and a group where they can ask each other things in between.
That's the part nobody expects to matter. A six-week course somebody does alone in a spare room is a very quiet six weeks. The same six weeks with a call in the diary and half a dozen other people going at the same pace is a different experience, and it's closer to the hall than to a video library.
There's a certificate at the end for the people who finish, too. Some people want to finish things. Giving them something to finish for isn't manipulative, it's just tidy.
When to leave all of this alone
Four cases where this is the wrong month for it.
Your course isn't made yet. Drop-off is a problem you earn by selling something. Finish the six weeks first.
Everyone you teach is in the room with you. If the beginners course runs in a hall and people either turn up or they don't, you can already see the back row. You don't need a screen for that.
What you sell is one recording rather than a run of weeks. A single class people buy and watch once has no middle to fall out of. Progress screens and week-by-week release are for something with six parts.
You know you won't open the list. This works when somebody looks every couple of weeks and writes to the people who've stopped. The screen shows you who; writing to them is still your evening.
$47 a month, one price
That is the whole bill. There is nothing in it to decode.
It covers unlimited courses and products, up to 1,000 active students, hosted video with a terabyte of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder and the AI assistant with 1,500 messages a month, unlimited communities and chat. Releasing lessons over time, the drip emails, the calendar and live sessions, daily check-in challenges, certificates on completion, marked assignments and the progress screens are all part of it rather than an upgrade.
Extra video bandwidth, if you ever need it, is $10 per terabyte. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
You connect your own Stripe account and the money lands with you, less Stripe's own 2.9% plus 30 cents, which everybody pays wherever they sell. We take nothing on top.
Start with the course you've already sold once
There's a 30-day free trial. It doesn't ask for a card, nothing happens automatically when it runs out, and if it's not for you, you close the tab.
Don't rebuild anything. Take the six weeks you already recorded, put them in as they are, set the lessons to arrive a week apart, and write two emails: one that goes out with week two, one that goes out at the end. That is one evening.
Then look at the list in a fortnight. You'll know who's still with you and who stopped, and roughly when they stopped, which is the thing you've wanted since the first fourteen people paid.