Predicating the Future Is NOT in My Job Description

I've been building online course sites since 2014. I've been doing it a long time and I've stopped predicting how successful my clients will be when I first meet them. Here's an example of why that is.

I landed my top customer years back while I was on vacation in Spain. My wife and I had just flown across the Atlantic from Miami to Madrid. We were exhausted, resting from our flight and I get a call. I'm used to these working vacations. It's kind of the way I wired and I start talking to this lady.

She teaches clinical folks, parents of disabled kids and other people how to work with the mentally disabled, mentally challenged and potentially violent people. She has a program based on course material she has produced from years of experience. She's written a lot of books in this space. She already had an audience that was familiar with her work.

In that initial call, she tells me she wants to reach as wide an audience as possible. She says her program is needed badly by her audience and she wants to make it available for $20 a year.

You heard me right.

In the back of my mind, the course builder in me is thinking, "That's a tough business. You gotta sell a lot of 20 dollar accounts to keep it afloat.

We took on the project. The initial payment covered my vacation. That was a big plus. We started working with her and slowly but surely
I come to understand the experience she brought to the project. She has a strong reputation in her field, Here materials are widely recognized for addressing the problem she addresses.

And here I am, the online course and membership site builder with a lot of experience and that's just a business model I don't see succeed very often. But this lady, had done her homework. Her brand was extremely strong and she overcame the hurdles we don't usually see a lot of people overcome.

We've now been working with her for over six years. We've expanded her online course to include a lot more content and it's now available in English, Spanish, French, Icelandic (yes, you heard that right), and is also available in American Sign Language.

It sells a lot of courses, and a lot of them to large organizations that buy her programs in blocks, so that their entire organization can use it. She has customers that take 500 or more licenses for their employees to use.

I still give advice when confronted by customers making what I think is a bad decision, but I'm less likely than I was years back and predicting the success or failure of an online course program. Our job is to bring the best of what we know from our experience building these sites and combine that with the subject matter expertise the customer brings. Together that's a strong combination for online course and membership site success.

I have stopped being overly judgmental about people's business ideas. My job is to support them so we bring solutions to market that benefit the customer and works well for us.

If you need someone like me to discuss your ideas for an online course, your ideas for a membership program, let me know. There's no obligation. It's a free call.

I'm happy to share what I know and see if there's something we can do together to
benefit you and your customers.