The world is hungry for knowledge and learning.
Because people want to grow.
For unstructured learning and doing it themselves, people browse YouTube and the rest of the web.
Those looking for structured learning buy a book and invest in a course.
The willingness to invest in online courses has grown multifold in the past couple of years.
It’s a big opportunity for anyone who wants to earn big on the back of their expertise.
Here is a simple blueprint that you can use to launch your profitable course. With the help of this blueprint, you can do it even if you haven’t done it before.
Audience to Course Blueprint
The right way to approach it will be following steps 1-4 over 90-120 days and then going ahead with steps 5-6.
| Step | Action | Goal | Suggested duration |
| 1 | Put together a list of ~100 people who will be willing to talk for 20-30 minutes | Have a ready base of people to talk to | Over a period of 2 weeks |
| 2 | Doing audience research (50 conversations with the ideal audience) | Use this to build your set of questions. – Understand their problems, the words they use to describe those problems (ask this in different ways, like ask – what do search for when online to find a solution to this problem) – What have they done so far to solve that problem – Names of books, courses they bought or plan to buy – 2-3 people they follow in the space – If a perfect solution existed for their problem, what would they be willing to pay for that? Towards the end, ask these exact questions: – If you could wave a magic wand and create a program that delivered everything you need, what would it include? – What would you be willing to invest in for your dream program? – Fill in these blanks for me – I want to go from ________ to _______ so that ________. (This question will give us the transformation they are looking for) If the person is a good fit, schedule a follow-up call with them for when the offer is ready (schedule this call after about 2 weeks.) | 6-8 weeks |
| 3 | Sales conversation with the right-fit audience from step 2 | Sell them on transformation and get them to pay to be part of the inaugural cohort of 3-10 people (more the better) | 2-3 weeks after step 2 |
| 4 | Run the live inaugural cohort | Get feedback for the program, record transformations, and get testimonials (to use social proof in the next round of promotion) | 4-8 weeks |
| 5 | Update the cohort, record the missing pieces | Create a scalable version of the course | 2-3 weeks |
| 6 | Launch this new version (either as a live/on-demand hybrid or on-demand course) | Build and test a scalable customer acquisition and onboarding system | 2-3 weeks, |
Follow the four-step process and launch your first course.
