In 2022, Teachable ran a competition where creators could enter to win a grand prize of $100,ooo by making the most sales of anyone over the course of six months. We also offered a $10,000 prize to runner-up three winners. The creators involved worked hard to create their courses, market them, and make sales over that time.
The first-place winner was The Chrysalis Course, run by photographer and online educator Kayla Locke. You can read her story here. But we wanted to highlight those who worked hard and came close to winning too. Below are question-and-answer interviews with two of those runners-up, Luna Templates, and RGP Development.
Luna Templates
Hana Drdla and Chloe Ford
Products offered: Courses
Time on Teachable: 1.5 years
What do you teach?
Design Freedom on Shopify is a creative course for designers who want to confidently offer Shopify design and development services to clients. We start by teaching the business side of web design on Shopify. Like what questions to ask clients, how to scope a project, and how much to charge. Then we get into web design by teaching the fundamentals of designing for the Shopify platform specifically. And then we focus on how to use code to elevate websites and bring any design to life on Shopify. Ultimately, we help designers fast-track their way to becoming a Shopify expert.
How did the competition motivate you?
This was our first course and to be honest, we weren’t sure if we’d launch it in time to even be part of the challenge! Creating our course took several months of planning the curriculum, writing scripts, putting together project slides and briefs, and finally, recording. Our biggest motivator was a baby on the way, and that hard deadline got us to launch the course in the last week of the challenge!
Why courses?
We created a course because we know it’s so hard to find answers out there, and for us, we only got those answers through years of experience, figuring it out ourselves through trial and error. Taking years to learn the ropes leads to stress and burnout which really puts a damper on entrepreneurship. We want to help other designers fast-track their success and thrive in their businesses. To us, the more talented designers we can get on Shopify, the more clients will come to it and the more the platform will grow. Everyone wins!
We initially launched our business with the templates and a blog, always with the idea to create a course. The templates really helped build trust with our audience, and then people began asking for the course more and more, so we knew there was a demand and we finally started carving out time for it and planning.
How has launching a course changed your business?
Before the course, we were a designer and a developer. Since launching the course, we’ve become teachers, community managers, product creators, and especially, marketers. While we used to consider ourselves a design or tech business, now we’re a mix of tech and education.
With the course and templates, making money is certainly different than client work. With client work, we were paid upfront and did the work knowing exactly what the reward would be. Now, we put a lot of work in, not necessarily knowing what the payoff will be. So a mindset change has definitely had to happen there.
What are your next goals for your school?
Our goal is to get more of our students to complete our course so they can get the results they want. On average, online courses have a 15% completion rate. We want to help our students along with the content more by embedding self-accountability into the course. Things like course guides, check-ins with students, email sequences to keep students on track, and challenges or gamification. Anything that can help motivate students to go through the content, complete the work, and participate in our community space. Their success is our success, so we need to help them get there. We’d also like to provide more course perks like workshops and group coaching opportunities.
RGP Development
Ross Bercun, CEO, and Rodrigo Garcia Platas, President
Products offered: Courses, coaching
Time on Teachable: Less than 1 year
What do you teach?
We teach a unique method of temperament identification that works with both biological and psychological structures. To put it simply: the ability to read and understand a person by looking at them.
It’s a hybrid approach between Unani BioTypes (Tibb) and Systemic Psychology that breaks down which parts of us are nature and which parts are nurture.
How did the competition motivate you?
BioType Basics was our first course and we were very excited to find a way to bring our live course to the virtual, self-guided format. We loved the incorporation of embedded videos and quizzes to further our students’ comprehension as well as the ability to build in opportunities for them to talk to an expert should they still have questions by the end.
Why courses?
When we started our company to teach people about BioTypes and Psychology in 2020, we realized very quickly that there was high demand for this information all over the world. A lot of people would reach out to ask if we were offering courses in different time zones. The best solution was to come up with an excellent on-demand version of our live course so that student locations and time zones were no longer an issue. We’re thrilled that people are able to take our courses at their own pace no matter their work schedule or geographic location.
How has launching a course changed your business?
We love the ability to expand and diversify our offerings. With our online courses, we can now create much more niche content without needing to worry about if there are enough students to immediately fill up a live course. We’re finding ourselves exploring new topics within our area of expertise and creating courses that allow for people to discover us organically and in their own time. It’s taken a lot of pressure off of needing to create broad-stroke offerings and now we can truly deliver some incredible and specific information such as courses for people in business, sales, relationships, and families.
What are your next goals for your school?
We’re planning to launch five new online courses this year including a BioType approach to Sales, Relationships, Family, Organizations, and a renovated version of our flagship program Balancing Your BioType that comes with one on one coaching from our certified coaches.
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