How Do You Get Past “Stuck” When Building Your Membership or Online Course Project

I get a lot of calls from business owner that choose to build their online course or membership site themselves using what I like to call the “learn as you go” process.

They are in Lone Ranger mode and that’s a difficult way to go about it.

They have content they already use as part of their training, coaching or consulting practice. They have it in a format they can be used to teach. They have done the research and selected their platform. Then they start building it and at some point they get stuck. They cannot proceed and that’s when they call me. They need an expert to get them past their “stuck.”

Let me go over this and options that are much better for getting your project up and running quickly.

When these people typically call me, they are:

• Stuck and unable to get their project launched or
• Frustrated because they features they thought they could build isn’t working they way they expected or
• Missing deadlines they had set for business partners or customers and is leading to other issues for them or
• Spending hours and hours of time on the project at the expense of other tasks that aren’t getting done and cannot continue or
• Something else.

This can be very embarrassing to them. They are an expert in their fields. This is where they are at their best. They have taken this one and often has a business partner or a potential customer waiting on them. And then they are waiting and waiting and waiting.
The business owners stress and frustration levels are way up. They are not meeting expectations they have set for them. They aren’t used to falling so far behind on this project and all the other tasks they are falling behind on because they decided to build this site themselves.

This is costing and has a big opportunity cost in terms of time lost, money spent and other priorities falling behind at the expense of this project that they now thing will NEVER get done, launched and working.

Here is an example of one customer that has been a long-time customer of ours. When they called us, they were in a better position than most because their system was at least making money for them. They had gotten their course up and running but it gave a very rough customer experience. Customers put up with it because their content was really good, but it was not something they were proud of.
The problem that caused them to look for outside help was they didn’t know how many paying customers they had. They had a lot of non-paying customers with full access to their content. They had nothing in place to collect payments from customers when a credit card got declined. The were not suspending member access for non payment. They asked us to work with them to get this all under control. They hired me to review their system and get their subscriptions, course access controls and e-commerce collection processes in place.

Another customer of ours is an experts at producing course content in their space. They had a large number of fellow instructors signed up to publish their course content with them. They had built a very attractive BuddyBoss, LearnDash, WooCommerce Wordpress website. The visual design and course content were very nicely done. The problem was it didn’t work. Selling the courses wasn’t giving members access to the set of courses that went with the package they purchased. The login credentials were not consistently getting sent to new members. When it did work, the customer experience was difficult and confusing. They could not launch it with these issues.
Another one of my customer has a very in demand certification course. He offers people in his industry continuing professional education credits. These are credits needed for keeping your license current. His course was working. It was a Wordpress LearnDash site. His problem was he had to manage it all manually. Every time he got an order, he had to manually provide access. He could not scale his solution because it all depended on him to run it and that was keeping him from doing all the other thing he needed to be doing.

These are examples of customers of mine that reached out AFTER they got really frustrated and realized they needed outside help. These were customers that basically paid twice to get the system they wanted. They also made decisions, because they didn’t know better, that later caused them a lot of rework because they missed out on commonly known best practices that people in the know understand.

I can share countless examples of business owners that never got as far as these three customers of mine. It happens over and over again.