What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of,
so the rest of us can do the same.
All right, we're here today with some of the best online course creators that I know. So
many IndieHackers who are getting started and who are successful are successful because
they're finding ways to teach other people online. And I think the most straightforward
way to teach people online is through online courses. So we've got Andrew Barry, who runs
the On Deck Course Creators Fellowship. On Deck is blowing up. Everybody's talking about
it and people who aren't talking about it seem to be part of it already. We've also
got Marie Poland, who runs an online course called Notion Mastery. Marie's badass. I don't
know if this is public, Marie. If it's not, we'll bleep it out. I don't even know if this
is accurate. But I heard your course sold like 500 or 600 grand in revenue last year,
something insane.
In the last year, yeah.
It's crazy because I've been seeing you teach everybody Notion and I just didn't realize.
I would have guessed like a fifth of that. So I'm super impressed. I think it's amazing.
Super inspiring.
And then last but not least, we've got Ali Abdaal, a brilliant YouTuber with over a million
and a half subscribers. You've also got a course called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy.
And you're also a full-time medical student, I believe. Welcome to the show, Ali.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.
So maybe we'll start there because that's a crazy amount of productivity. I don't think
most people could do even one of those things, let alone all three of them. How are you so
productive, Ali? How are you doing so much more than everyone else can?
I mean, it's worth saying that I'm no longer a full-time medical student. I've now become
a doctor. So I was working as a doctor for two years while doing all this stuff. And
I've kind of taken a break at the moment in intending to travel the world and do like
medical stuff in Australia, but then pandemic happened. So right now I'm in a bit of a weird
place where I'm sort of a productivity guru on the internet, but I don't really have a
job other than doing internet stuff. So it always feels a bit weird. But whenever people
ask me about the productivity thing, my main spiel is just that a lot of it is around just
enjoying the things that you're doing. And part of that is finding things to work on
that you find fun. Like I'm sure you find it fun working on indie hackers, but also
part of it is sort of choosing to find fun in the things that you end up doing anyway.
And so a lot of students studying for exams, things like that, you don't really have a
choice in the matter, but there are lots of things that we can do to make the process
more enjoyable for ourselves. And so it's like that thing that Naval Ravikant says that,
you know, if you find something that feels like play to you and looks like work to others,
then the productivity kind of takes care of itself.
I love that. I've been doing that a lot with indie hackers recently. For example, for this
podcast, I hired like a podcast boss and she's an editor, a producer, she does the notes.
She'll sit down with me for two hours a week and have a call where I prep for episodes.
And it's way more fun to do it with somebody who's like, you know, riffing back and forth
with me than doing it on my own. And so it turns this thing where like, Oh, it's pretty
fun, but now it's super fun. And all the hard parts I've just outsourced and it's like a
thousand times better and easier to work on.
Yeah, I was going to say, Ali, you've also got an exceptionally strong team that you've
built around you, which when I was working with you and your program, it was quite a
joy to witness that. And I know that's something sort of near and dear to Marie as well. I
don't think any of us could do any of this without a really strong team around us.
Marie, what's your team like? Because on the outside looking in, it's like, this is just
Marie. It's your face. And it's you talking. What's going on behind the scenes?
Yeah, like it used to be my husband and I, and then he took on a full-time job about
a year and a half ago. So it kind of went, you know, to back to one, but I couldn't do
everything myself. So I had an assistant for the last year and a half and I only just hired
her full-time last month. So now it's two of us and also bring on various contractors
and assistant coach too. So I actually stopped doing one on one work and now I have an assistant
coach that handles all of the one on one. So that's, that's been amazing. Like it's
just such a shift in my own focus. Like now I can really focus on the stuff I want to
focus on content creation. I don't have to do all the logistics behind the scenes. So
it's a game changer when you hire that first person.
So walk me through what it is that you do exactly. Because I use Notion religiously,
like my prep for this podcast. It's all in Notion. I've tried to explain Notion to other
people. They have no idea what it is. What's Notion and how do you use your coursework
exactly?
Yeah, I mean, I use it to manage nearly every aspect of my life and business. Everything
from like tracking the health of my plants to even track the offer that I made to my
assistant to, you know, become a full-time member. Like every piece of my business is
managed through Notion. So people call it a productivity platform. And it is a lot slower
than a lot of other platforms. So that is a big complaint that people have. But I think
of it as a place where everything is integrated. I can see everything in one place. And that
peace of mind of just knowing where all the like moving parts can sit and it's one or
two clicks away, whether it's data, whether it's creativity, note taking, you name it,
it all just kind of lives in this one place. And it just brings so much peace to my brain.
So I got so stoked about this. I was, you know, sharing it with all my friends and colleagues
and everything. And at some point I was like, okay, there's there's something here. I think
when the first person said, if you make a course about this, I will give you money.
I was like, okay, like there's there's something here. I'm talking about it enough. You know,
people are asking questions and stuff. And so I decided to do a webinar on it took me
like three years to get the courage to run a webinar. I was so scared. And I was just
so excited, you know, chatting about all the things I'd done with notion. And it just kind
of honestly, that's everything kind of exploded from there. The notion team reached out, they
were really curious to chat with me more about collaborating. And so business just kind of
took things in a totally different direction. And I was like, could I get paid to teach
people about this? Is this a thing I could make a living on? And it was it was a risk.
I was like, okay, do I want to be known as the notion girl? I don't know. Let's try it.
Let's try it for a season. Let's like see what happens. I have so many other skills.
Like I've been working with online course creators for so long. I was like, let's try
it and ship to course. And then business took a left turn. And I was like, well, okay, that
answers my question. So let's like make hay while the sun is shining and see what happens.
And so the rest is kind of history. Yeah, it's fascinating to see what kinds of topics
and sort of focuses you can have to actually make money from a course. Because it didn't
seem like something that you predicted in the beginning. And I think that's where almost
every course creator has to start. And if you want this to be something that you make
a living from, you know, is this even the right topic? Allie, you have basically sort
of transitioned to teaching people not just how to be productive, but how to be YouTubers.
How much money do you charge for your course? How did you choose the topic? Yeah, so at
the moment, ours is a sort of a six week live online course. And so it's 1500 for the basic
edition $2,500 for the premium and 5,000 for the executive. That's a lot of money. It was
like really, really, really scary charging that amount. I'd done courses in the past
where mostly my courses were on Skillshare, which is like free basically for people to
access with a free trial or like a Netflix esque subscription. And I told a few courses
helping people get into med school for the sort of $100 price tag. But doing a sort of
high ticket live online course that was like, yeah, I hadn't hadn't really done that before.
When I thought of online courses, you know, the model I had in my head was the hey, you
pay a few hundred dollars for a course and you watch a series of videos. But I was speaking
to two friends, Tiago Forte and David Perrell, who run their own live courses, which I'd
taken. And I was running them through my idea of hey, doing a course for YouTubers. And
they said that look, you should really consider doing it as a live thing because course completion
rates for self paced courses are like abysmally low. And like basically no one completes them.
You and I have probably signed up to dozens of online courses and just sort of watched
maybe one or two videos in them. It's just the the model of doing it live seemed interesting.
And so I tried it out sort of late 2020. And it was just so much fun and infinitely easier
actually to teach a class on zoom than it is to record a load of pre recorded videos.
So yeah, we started off a lot cheaper than that, but sort of hiked up the prices over
time as the demand increased. And it's been really fun. Tell me about that process. Because
you said your earlier courses were like $100. Now your highest tier is $5,000. You've gone
50x higher. How do you have the emotional wherewithal to do that? Because I know people
who are afraid to charge $10 a month for their product that they spent the last year building.
The thing that kind of sold it for me was speaking to this marketing coach called Billy
Bruce who basically said that look, you need to stop thinking of selling as being something
evil. And you need to think of selling as being you you're doing a service to your customers,
you're doing them a favor by letting them buy from you. And as long as you are delivering
on the value that they promised, they will be glad that you offered that service in like
in a weird way, just changing their mindset to I am trying to make money off of people.
And more towards, I'm trying to create a transformation for people and they will be happy to pay for
it that that's made me more okay with charging for it. But still, you know, the first time
around we put the car up, it started off as $400 as like our cheapest plan. And I was
I was terrified. I was like sweating through all of my clothing just before the car went
live. And I was just so surprised that people actually bought it. And then every other course
creator I've spoken to says that look, if you just double your prices, you actually
end up with the same number of people in a weird way, the more someone pays for something,
the more invested they are in actually making it work for them. And so weirdly, if I were
to charge $100 for my YouTube course, so many more people would ask for refunds, then if
we charge $5,000 for it and so many fewer people would actually go through the course
and find it useful than the higher price tag.
Yeah, I talked to Jordan O'Connor on the podcast. And he does very interesting story about how
he was like working so hard to become an Eddie Hacker and learning everything he could. And
he like used his credit card to pay like $2,000 for a course to learn SEO. He was just in
debt. And it's like, you know what, he actually finished that course and took it and took
it really seriously because he spent a lot of money on it.
And I know that I've spent hundreds of dollars on lots of things are really super cheap and
just never finished it. So Andrew, I think you're making the right decision to charge
$3,000 for the on-deck of course, Creators Fellowship. And the math there is pretty cool
too. If you have 111 people paying $3,000, that's $333,000 you've gotten from barely
over 100 people compared to people who are charging like $5 a month. They need thousands
of customers just to be able to pay their salary.
And so this is what I like about education businesses, you can charge a lot of money.
It's super valuable to people they're willing to pay, you're actually helping them so they're
grateful they don't feel ripped off. And you don't have to like be some sort of marketing
genius who reaches millions of people like all these do on YouTube in order to actually
cover your costs.
It's a lot easier to sell one thing for $100 than 100 things for $1 like the asymmetry
in the ease of selling is just like completely insane. And also the sorts of people that
pay thousands for an online course are also a lot less likely to need handholding than
the sorts of people that pay $10 for an online course.
So this is one of the cool things about on-deck. I don't know how to describe on-deck. It's
almost like an online college that has all these different you call them fellowships
or kind of like, you know, podcasting and angel investing and course creation. And one
of the coolest things about it is like it's cohort based. So it's like going to college
like you don't just take the course by yourself and do it alone in your room. There's a bunch
of other cool, smart, successful people who take the course and the exact same two or
three month period that you take it. And then half the value isn't even like the curriculum
it's just like getting to be in the same program with Marie or Ali or whoever else. Is that
a good description description of on-deck Andrew? Like how does it work?
No, that's that's what I'm caught on. And it's on deck started as a community, you know,
that's its core and it's probably one of the best out there in terms of offering community
that the value of that ecosystem is just it's exponentially growing now with the people
and the sort of quality of people that are getting added to it. What we are now working
on and what I'm specifically focused on with helping some of the other program directors
is on layering the educational component to it. So thinking about more of a tighter curriculum
that looks at the learning journey. And that's actually the hardest part is the community.
I think many would agree, right? And so the fact that they've already nailed that is great
that we can layer in this educational piece that kind of takes it into that online university
or Stanford or the internet as it's been called.
I'm going to get all of you guys opinions on the most important parts of education because
you all educate. I spend time educating indirectly through interviewing people like you. And
I think probably everybody has strong opinions about education. Like I remember being in
high school and just being so pissed off at the curriculum that we were learning like
I had to memorize like what date did this hospital burn down and like, you know, what
month in 1873? I'm like, why does this matter? Why am I learning this? I could be learning
a million better things. Like you're not teaching me personal finance. You're not teaching me
psychology. You're not teaching me about sex or relationships or anything. And so for me,
like the curriculum is super big. What do you guys think about online education? What
do you think is important for teaching people effectively?
One of the things that I often think about is just the information that you're delivering
needs to be useful in some way. Like immediately, like this student needs to be able to see
how they can apply it. And often this is just the one key difference between the good medical
lectures that I've attended and delivered and the bad ones, where the good ones will
start off with a scenario. They'll say, all right, five years from now, you're going to
graduate, you're going to be a doctor. Let's imagine you're in the emergency department
and you, a patient comes in and they've got shortness of breath and chest pain and they've
got this and that. And then you do an electrocardiogram and this is what it shows like, how would
you approach this? And at the start, no one has any idea because they haven't learned
the subject yet, but imagining themselves in the shoes five years from now thinking,
oh crap, I need to know the answer to this, just makes them pay attention and absorb it
in a way where if you just had a lecture on, here's how the heart works or here's how EKGs
work, no one will pay attention because it's just not immediately obvious why that might
be useful. And like the weird thing I found was that once I graduated medical school,
I now cared a lot more about the knowledge I was getting in a way wishing I'd paid more
attention in med school because I could now see it being immediately relevant. And I just
wish more people did that, just making it obvious what the point of something is.
You'd probably agree with this, but framing your modules in terms of outcomes instead
of topics. Like I think a lot of first time teachers may be approaching it in terms of
I want to teach X versus what does the student want to be able to do or who do they want
to be by the end of this module? And you can think about that at the course level, like
who do I want to be by the time I finished this course? And who do I want to be by the
time I finished this module? Like you can kind of look at that as a micro or macro thing.
So think of it in terms of action. What should people be able to do by the end of this? And
not just like, you're going to learn SEO. It's like, well, what am I actually learning?
Like what do I want to be able to do by the end of this?
I think about that with Indiana's podcast episodes too, where I like to start off episodes
talking about like, okay, where are you at? You know, where you're making like a crazy
amount of money with your course, like Ali, like you're completely independent, you have
this huge YouTube channel and like also you've got like all these passive income streams,
etc. And I think once you hear, okay, this is where this person is, like I would like
to be there, then suddenly everything they say takes on like a lot more importance. You
actually care about their advice versus if you just jump straight in, you have no clue
how much money this person is making or what their life is like, then it's like, why listen?
Do you share your revenue numbers, Ali, for your courses and stuff?
It's about $1 per year per subscriber. But like last like 2020 for us, we made about
$300,000 from the first cohort of the YouTuber Academy. And about $500,000 that year from
Skillshare, which was weird, I never thought that would be the case. And maybe 200k from
brand deals on YouTube and about 150k from AdSense. So all in all, it was about 1.3 million.
It's a ton. It's very de-risked because you've got multiple income streams, it's not just
one thing, it's four or five different things of, you know, YouTube cuts out your ad deal
or whatever, then you're probably still fine.
My biggest fear was like at the start of 2020 was, oh my God, this business is too reliant
on YouTube. Let's start making classes on Skillshare. We're like, oh, okay, now we're
too reliant on Skillshare because it makes up half our revenue. Okay, let's think about
how we diversify away from Skillshare. You know, let's try and do our own course, which
is how the YouTuber Academy first came to be as a self hosted kind of live course.
I want to switch gears for a second and talk about the dark side of course creation. There's
always posts about this on Andy Hackers, because people get kind of tired of seeing how many
people are selling their course. And I think from the outside looking in, sometimes it
can look like it's just a bunch of people, you know, here's how to get big on Twitter.
And that's how you get big on Twitter by selling your course to get big on Twitter. You know,
it seems very circular. What are all your opinions on, I guess, teacher qualifications?
You know, if you go through the sort of traditional educational system, you go to a college, like,
you know, you're getting educated by people who are, you know, you know, somewhat qualified
to be there. If you're buying online courses, it's really easy to end up on Clubhouse and
some scammer room where they're telling you how to make a million dollars next week. And
suddenly you've paid, you know, your entire life savings for some scammy course.
You know, sort of a buyer beware, right? Like you kind of have to do your research on who
is the person that you're that you're taking this course from. And there's a difference
between how to make $10,000 doing X versus I made $10,000 doing X. Like, just because
you did a thing once doesn't mean that's a framework or a system. And so I think is there
like a pattern of success, right? Is there like more than one thing to look to? What
is this teacher's history? What is our experience? I know I'm not one for like official credentials.
I don't really care necessarily. Like, did someone go to university and get a degree
and do whatever, but I want to know like, what is the output of what they've done? And
do I trust that person? And so that trust with a teacher, I think happens long before
the course is purchased, right? It's like you're following them on Twitter, you're hearing
what they say, there's resonance that happens long before. And so I think resonance is a
big, big thing. Like you can have 10 different teachers teaching 10 different topics, but
like the way someone delivers it just really resonates with you. And you're like, yes,
okay, I like the way that person delivers that I want that. So I think the interesting thing
here is that like, I mean, a lot of colleges are also quite scammy, like you're paying
a lot of money, you're going into debt for like hundreds of thousands. And like, what's
the return on that? Is the lecture actually good? I went to a pretty good medical school,
like Cambridge University is pretty solid, I would say 95% of my lectures were boring
and uninteresting. And most of the people I knew, including me, we learned to ourselves
from YouTube videos. So I think education as a whole suffers from this problem of you
might not know how good it is. At least with online courses, broadly, you actually can
see testimonials. And if you YouTube, if you search YouTube for review of Notion Mastery
or review of the part time YouTuber Academy, you will see people creating their own supposedly
unbiased reviews about it, which you don't really see, you know, review of Cambridge
University Medical School curriculum 2021. It's just not really a thing.
Yeah, I went to MIT tuition is $55,000 a year times four years, like an insane amount. And
it's like I barely went to class, like I don't remember what I learned in my classes, I was
mostly teaching myself to code, like by going online to the same websites everybody else
was. And like there's advantages, like it's a cool school, people respect you more if
you have that on your resume, blah, blah, blah. And like I met some really amazing people,
but like, they didn't really even have to have a curriculum. It was mostly just like
a socially acceptable stamp to pay a lot of money to get.
Yeah, it's credentialism. The scammy marketers online courses actually was so helpful in
helping me refine what we were going to do with under course careers, because it became
this perfect counterpoint. And they're so easy to spot, which is great. They make it
so easy. Like you go into the clubhouse rooms, and it's like a million emojis like rhinos
and the bionic arms and all that sort of stuff. And it's like, you know, okay, cool. I know
exactly what that is about. And for me, the big difference is also what's great is it's
easy to spot from a student's perspective is you can tell you can tell if a course is
transforming people's lives. It's like, as you're saying, like people were just creating
like long videos, you know how much time and effort goes into making a video and they are
doing that just to review his course. That means that changed their life. That's the
difference I think when you get into the real transformational courses. And the other thing
is passion. Like everyone, everyone here is super passionate about teaching and that that
drives the transformation. But it's also like it's an energy like Marie says that you can
you can see and resonate with long before you even take the course.
Another topic here on the dark side of education is are people even finishing these courses
or if you pay a lot of money for a course, so you're probably more likely to finish it.
But is there any sort of guarantee that once you take a course that it actually helped
you? You know, is there any place to leave a review and say this course sucks for future
students? It seems like there's really no real accountability here. And there's like
some models that are different. For example, Lambda School has these income share agreements
where they essentially don't charge you tuition unless you go get a job, which is probably
like the most accountable you can be for your course changing somebody's lives. How do you
all think about this with your courses? How do you know that people are getting the value
that they pay for?
This is a real struggle. There isn't really a kind of trust pilot for online courses.
And so a lot of it is reliant on the course creator kind of making information public.
And obviously, you know, if we have some students and we do have some students who you know,
when we ask them how transformational was this course for you, they'll say it's one
out of 10. But we're not going to publish, we're not going to publicize that we're not
going to sort of put their bad review on the website because we control the website. The
thing we do is that we you know, we've got a meeting about this, like two days from now
where my team and I'll get together, we look through every single one of our entry and
exit survey responses, we say kind of thank you to the people who rated it 10 out of 10,
which is like 70% of people. And we spend a lot of time going through the people who
rated it less than eight out of 10 thinking, okay, what could we have done differently?
How can we improve this for next time? How can we make sure? And with ours, and with
a lot of a lot of these other live courses, there is a kind of money back guarantee where
what we say for ours is that if you complete the work, ie you do the opening survey, you
just put out the six videos a week that we're you know, the six videos over six weeks that
we're asking you to do all we all we ask is just make one video a week that is the only
thing you have to do. And you still don't find the course valuable email us and we will
give you all of your money back. And I don't think we've not had a single person who's
actually done everything and asked for their money back. We've had people who've said halfway
through that our real life got in the way, you know, I got COVID, I couldn't do the course
and we're like, okay, that's fine, have your money back. Like, we don't we don't want you
want your money in this case. But it does rely on the individual course creators being
honest about this, there isn't a trust pilot for courses.
I'm gonna throw in there, there potentially is one. Eric Jorgensen is actually working
on something called course correctly.com. And it's that's kind of exactly what he's
trying to do. So that's, that's pretty cool, I think. And it's going to be so so valuable
for this whole space.
Yeah, I think, like Ali said, going through that student feedback, asking the right questions
also in your intake, right? Like, what would you consider success going through this course?
That's really interesting. There's really fun data to look at there, like when people
are describing their own intentions for when they finish the course, and then an exit survey
to see, okay, well, how did that match up? You know, where did where did we drop the
ball or what could we do better? I think most people don't realize course design is sort
of like an iterative, like it's never really done, right? It's like, you go through a cohort,
you're like, okay, here's all the places where we notice gaps, you're always kind of going
back and tweaking and trying to improve it if you're a great instructor, I think a lot
of people can set it and forget it. But I also want to play a little bit of devil's
advocate to and that I don't think necessarily course completion is the best measure of course
success, like, and I'll say this as someone who I take a ton of courses, like I've always
taken courses online, like that's where all my money in business, I'm just like, always,
like, what's the like a shortcut, right? Like, where can I learn from all these amazing people
who've been been there before? And often I'll get what I need in the first couple modules.
I'm like, awesome, got my value out of the course, I'm good to go. And I'm happy. I'm
like really happy. Even just that one nugget that just made it worth it was like, that
was awesome. And so you might never see, like those instructors might not ever see anything
from me, and might not know that like that that piece of content or that delivery that
workshop changed something in my business and I went off and I was super happy. So there
aren't always mechanisms for that feedback to get surfaced. So I don't think completion
necessarily is always the best measure. It's those outcomes like how do we know that students
are actually applying that knowledge out in the real world and that's a little bit harder
to measure there's ways you can you can do that with the exit surveys and stuff like
that and reporting back doing those focus groups and stuff.
And away that's what the India hackers podcast is let me find any hackers who are crushing
it bring them on and publicize their stories as widely as possible. And it's funny because
often people are like, I don't want to hear the success stories. I want to hear the failure
stories give me the nitty gritty. And a lot of people have tried to start these sites
that are just failure stories and like you can't name any of them because no one actually
wants to read a bunch of failure stories. It's not inspiring. You don't actually learn
as much as you would think. And so I think the success stories are much better sort of
strategy to share.
Or it's interesting to learn the challenges and failures from the people who've hit a
certain level of success. You're like, where did you go wrong? It's like, I want to know
that. But I want to know it from someone who's made it right? Yeah, where where have you
gone wrong Marie?
Where have I gone wrong? Oh, I mean, there's so many places like when I first launched
the course, for example, it there was no content finished. It was a total total pilot total
beta. I'm actually a huge fan of always even if you're going to do an evergreen course
always launch it in a beta pilot first always always like you need that student feedback.
The course is never going to look like what you think it looks in your head. As soon as
you put it out into the wild, it takes on a whole different shape. So I think that's
really, really important. But I think one of the things that was so hard and having
launched the course inside of notion, and you can move data around, you can you can
move stuff. And I was very clear that it was a beta. But I think some folks that would
have benefited more from like a very structured linear process came in and it's like we had
like contents changing, I'm adding new modules, like there were people who were like excited
to be part of that building. And there were other people that were like, Whoa, this is
overwhelming. Like, you know, it was it was too much. And so it's just part of the learning
process. I'm like, Yep, okay, like, not everybody was maybe the best fit for for a total pilot
like that. But you just you learn and you just keep keep adapting and iterating.
I talked to Tara read who has a cool course teaching people to build apps without code.
And like her first thing, I think she gave a talk. And a few people in the audience were
like, Hey, can you teach us to do that? And she's like, for $1,000. And they're like,
Sure. And it was just like a super impromptu fly by the seat of her pants, just figure
it out. And then like after that, like I think it was like 50 or 100 people were like, Oh,
we want to learn that. And our course was now a little bit better, but still like super
beta. And like, that's the cool thing about teaching you can just like, like I could create
a course tomorrow, I could just jump in and say, Hey, he wants to be part of my course.
Probably a few hundred people would sign up and fly by the seat of my pants and like no
one's gonna die. People might ask for refunds, I'll happily give refunds. And then I also
won't put their negative testimonials on the website. But it's super easy to just get to
get started that way.
So I have a theory that everyone has an online course in them. Like if you are helping people
in a repeatable way, and you're doing, you've done that a few times already. And that could
be like coaching, consulting, it could be a service business, it could be, you know,
so many different ways. Then the only thing separating you from teaching or scaling your
impact is learning how to teach on the internet. And that's a skill, like you can totally learn
how to do that and get better at it, better at it. Like everyone said, it's an iterative
process.
What do you think is the most important thing to teach course creators, Andrew? Because
you're running the Course Creators Fellowship. It's very meta. You're like, got a course
basically teaching all these course creators how to make courses. And like your students
slash, you know, members are like, pretty great. Like Marie and Ali, like you guys could
be teaching. And yet you're part of the fellowship learning. Andrew, what are you teaching all
these amazing course creators?
Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, I recognize that there is no, like, I'm not the guru who's
going to teach you how to create the perfect course. I'm going to give as much in terms
of guidance and frameworks and ideas for thinking about your course. I was talking to a guy
earlier today whose course is a bunch of sort of guides on a website. And it's, you know,
they're like super multimedia with like audio versions and videos and stuff. And he was
like, is this a course? I'm like, yeah, absolutely. It is a course like that totally. And that's
the beauty of it. Like Marie and I talk about this all the time. There's such a massive
spectrum of what can a course can be in people. So first of all, people, it's about breaking
that like it doesn't have to be a code based course. It doesn't have to be a bunch of videos
on teachable. There's just a million different ways of content delivery. And so I think what's
more important before you even get into content delivery, what platform you're going to use,
all that sort of stuff is nailing three P's, which is how do you connect with the personal
meaning of every student coming in? So it's not about you saying, this is what you need,
but it's about you saying, I know what you want and you want and you want, and this is
how I'm going to connect you with what I think you need. And then peer to peer learning,
which we've talked about, like the power of the community and then the prompts to action,
like doing like Ali's six videos that you go, that's where you learn the most, not from,
you know, as amazing as Ali is in delivering his sessions, but you're going to learn so
much more just getting a video done and then it's writing and doing it again next week
and next week. So if you get those three P's, then the personal meaning, peer to peer learning
and then prompts to action, that's sort of the building blocks for great teaching.
And related to that, Andrew, the way you've got those three P's that are really memorable,
I think every course creator in a way can ask to distill their content into, hey, here's
a frame, like a memorable framework that you're going to come away with, right? I think that's
the hardest thing to do sometimes is to give your course that structure when it can feel
like a medley of information. It's like, how do we give this, what's my unique framework?
And that can be, I think one of the biggest challenges to do.
That's the creation part of this, right? Like that's, that's quite hard. Ali's got some
amazing ones there. What are your, some of the frameworks Ali just cracked me up.
And we've got like the bird song technique we've got. What's the bird song technique?
The bird song technique is a way of never running out of ideas for content. The theory
being that if you're a normal person and you listen to bird song, you think, Oh, it's some
bird singing. But if you're the sort of nerd who understands what bird song is and like
what birds it is, it suddenly takes on a whole new meaning. And it's like you've unlocked
this part of your brain that can distinguish between a sparrow and a robin and a nightingale.
And I don't know any other birds to name it. And similarly, when it comes to content creation,
when you become a creator and your mindset shifts from being a consumer to a creator,
suddenly you start seeing content ideas while you're scrolling through Twitter on the toilet.
Like more than half of my YouTube videos of video ideas have come like in the last four
years from me just being on the toilet, scrolling through Twitter. I think, Oh, you know, that's
a really interesting tweet that Collins just posted. I wonder if I can make a video kind
of touching on that thing and wait, I kind of talks about this thing or Oh, no, vol's
just posted something interesting, huh? I actually have some thoughts on that. Let's
make a video about it. So it's a bit of a stupid name, the bird song technique, but
it's, you know, it just makes it seem more memorable and in a way more legit than just
saying, guys, scroll through Twitter while you're on the toilet to come up with content
ideas.
Yeah, I love it. Marie, what do you think is naming and framing, right? What do you
think is the most valuable thing that you teach and your courses on Notion Mastery,
Marie?
Yeah, I think what has been really interesting is like, initially, it started as like, I'm
teaching you how to use this tool, you know, like people want like, how the heck do I what's
the quickest way to learn this tool, but the idea is it's what the tool allows you to do
that's more interesting, right? And so people have come in and they said, Oh, like I expected
to learn about Notion, but it was more like how to live your life better. I was like,
Whoa, okay, that's that's kind of interesting. And I think because maybe I share so much
of my own applications, like people see my own workspace all the time. I'm like, here's
how I do task management. Here's how I think about managing my plants, like, so they're
seeing all these different pockets of my life. And I think it's giving them ideas for how
to apply it in their own life. And it's like, I can't teach you about managing your tasks
in Notion if you don't actually know how to prioritize your own pillars of your own life.
So inevitably, I had to keep layering on these, well, let's we have to talk about habits,
we have to talk about that. So it just became bigger and bigger over time. I was like, Whoa,
okay, where do where do we cut this off? Like, how big does this become? And so I think some
of those elements people weren't expecting to learn about, but they're kind of necessary
because you're not just going to switch from one tool to another and think suddenly all
of your prioritization problems are going to be fixed, right? It's like, there's the
technical piece, but there's also habit building pieces when you're learning to manage this
stuff. So it's like new organizational habits. It's interesting how like when you when you
start making a course, you might have an intention of where it's going to go. And as you create
the content, and as students engage with it, you're like, Oh, wait, this is something a
little bit different. Or, oh, actually, maybe there's three courses in here. Like even Ali
and I were talking about this, because he's going to have beginners, intermediate, he's
got advanced people, like, you're going to have people at all different levels with different
intentions. And I think certainly with notion, it's like, Oh, wow, we have people who've
never touched the tool before, but like saw a video and bought it. And then we have people
who are super advanced been using it for two years, people that are managing their businesses
out of it, people that are like, running a farm and like a winery. I'm like, Whoa, okay,
how do I contain this when the intention is so different for all of these different students?
And I think that was the hardest challenge for me is what's core curriculum? And what
is really fun rabbit holes, you can go down. So like these branches of like, okay, well,
everyone's on this track, but there's going to be some people who are going to want to
go deeper. So probably the number one question that every indie hacker has for every successful
indie hacker is how did you get started? Because all of you are like pretty advanced, you know,
you've got hundreds of people taking on deck, you're making, you know, hundreds of thousands
of millions of dollars from your courses. Let's say your total total newbie, you have no idea
what it is, you can even teach, you've got no online audience, no knows who you are,
you have very few skills. How do you take the first step to become a course creator?
Yeah, so I think everyone does have something to teach. And I actually I keep a copy of
Austin Kleon's books, show your work being my favorite one on my desk at all times. Because
this is the book which takes like five minutes to read, basically, because it's so short
and pamphlet like, this is one of the books that most changed my life. Because when like
five years ago now in 2016, when I first read it, before that point, I was very scared of
putting myself out there online, I've been thinking, maybe I should start a blog, I never
really got around to it. Because I thought, you know, people are going to think I'm an
arrogant, whatever for having, you know, for having the the or the audacity to have my
own website, like, come on, who the hell does that? And I read, I read show your work. And
his point is that everyone has something to teach. And even if you're not teaching, like
just documenting your learning of something is actually a value add to other people trying
to learn the same thing. And he talks about C.S. Lewis's phrase, I think the curse of
the expert, where being a guru in something being an expert, is actually not necessarily
the best way to teach a beginner, because you probably have forgotten what the actual
struggles of a beginner are. So when I read that book, that like completely changed my
whole perspective on this stuff. And I started thinking, okay, I'm going to start writing
stuff online about my journey through entrepreneurship, because I'd been doing like the attempting
to do the indie hacker thing for like 10 years at that point, trying to learn to code, trying
to build my own like businesses, etc. And then when I started my YouTube channel, it
was a case of, okay, I'm in medical school, why don't I just share what it's like being
in med school and what it took to get in and you know, just share my thoughts on this,
because I thought I was reasonable at teaching. And just this thing of the way I think of
it is what can you teach to someone who is three years younger than you, but but who
is you in every other way? Like, what could you teach to yourself three years ago? And
anyone asking themselves that question will have answers to that. Like, three years ago,
I wish I would have known this or three years ago, I was trying to learn how to code and
I just then I discovered I don't know, code Academy. And here's how I learned and being
able to document that through something on the internet for free. So a blog or a YouTube
channel, I think that would be the first place to start. And certainly that's how I got my
start with online education.
I love that you're not discouraged by the fact that people might already be teaching
this like, Hey, you want to code? Guess what? There's lots of ways teach you how to code
shouldn't be discouraged. Marie, you're teaching people notion mastery, there's a lot notion
itself has guides for how to use notion. And yet you're still able to have this course
with any hackers, people had websites and interviews and books about how to start companies
well before this. And so it's one of the beautiful things about course creation is you don't
necessarily have to be discouraged because someone's already doing what you want to teach.
It comes back to that residence thing, right? Like different teachers have different teaching
styles, different delivery mechanisms, different ways of phrasing the same thing, you can hear
the same thing 10 times, but you're like, Oh, just the way they put that into words
was like, yes, or the written word versus video, right? Like some people are much stronger
on video versus the written word or amazing tweet storms or something like that, right?
So it's like, we have to remember that we're going to create resonance in a different way.
And just keep adding to your experience bucket. And over time, people are just going to be
like, Whoa, that journey is so interesting. I really want to learn from that person.
This is something anybody can do this. I actually, when I first started my business five or six
years ago now, I was sort of in this frame of mind, coming out of coming out of corporate
world where I was like, I need to pretend to be a lot bigger than I am. So it wasn't
like I was like, we, I was always saying we to clients and me not, it was just me, like
it worked, but I had like a very slow growth trajectory in those early days. And then fast
forward to this past year, I probably in August had like 300 followers on Twitter, you know,
didn't take it seriously on Twitter at all. But I started realizing, okay, I've been doing
this online course thing, but for, you know, in a corporate environment for 15 years, I
had a lot of experience there. There was now, I started, I basically started picking apart
what online course creators are doing and sort of like, Oh, this is what really worked
well with writer passage, for example, that's what, you know, destination journey groups.
And that type of stuff just started resonating with people on Twitter. And so this, I had
this like crazy growth curve from August until, um, until December when Eric Torrenberg reached
out to, well, actually before that, actually when Ali reached out and also, you know, Maria
and I, you know, like I'm sort of becoming friends with, with these folks who, yeah,
I mean, I was like, quite frankly, did not exist before August, you know? So I was like,
that's the valuable thing. It's just learn in public, start to share that stuff and don't
sort of keep it behind closed doors and pretend that you're, you're bigger than you are. Um,
because it, it really does pay off. So in a way it's like, you weren't even necessarily
having to do the brilliant stuff. You were putting in the work to figure out how other
people who were successful were doing it. And then you would share it personally and
say, Hey, here's, you know, my dissection of why this course works well. And you were
just doing it from your personal Twitter account, which kind of conferred to you a bunch of
expertise because no one else is really analyzing this stuff and breaking it down.
Yeah, that's exactly right. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you guys that learning
publicly is so huge, like not doing that work in secret, whatever you're learning, whatever
work you are doing. I think the people that I've seen struggle the most are the ones that
have, they've operated behind the scenes. They're doing all this work. They're working
with client, but there's no evidence of their work anywhere. I'm like, well, where's your,
like there's no YouTube videos. You've got some Instagram stories, which are ephemeral
and disappear, right? So they're almost like choosing these channels where there isn't,
there's no SEO, there's no way to find their work. And so you've got to be kind of findable.
And I think again, Twitter has just enabled so much conversation. Like it's so easy to
meet interesting people. If I think Andrew's interesting and I'm seeing him interact with
Ali and then someone else interesting replies, I'm like, whoa, like you're going down these
deep dives and meeting these really cool, interesting people who maybe think, think
like you, but also have a really different and interesting perspective too. So I, I think
courage is a big part of it. Just a willingness to put yourself out there, even if you don't
feel like an expert yet is huge. So I'm a huge believer in that, whether it's a blog
that you don't think anybody's watching yet, you know, sending out those email newsletters,
even if you've only got five subscribers, like you just have to start somewhere and
that resonance starts really slow, but that ripple effect and that like compound interest
of that 1% that you do every day, every week, whatever, even if you shipped a video a month
over two years, five years, like the results of that are going to be so much bigger than
if you just didn't take any action at all. And you're just kind of secretly working on
your skills, work on your skills in public, share what you're working on, share your opinions,
and you're going to find your people over time, but you got to put in the work.
And you don't have to have it figured out to begin with. That's the other thing, right?
I like it. It's such a paralyzing thing. And for, for a lot of people, for me included.
And I remember when I first started sharing stuff online, I was like, this is how to create
an online or not an online course, like a course for companies, you know, like no one
cared about that on Twitter. And it was until I started like talking about what course creators
are doing that that's where it started resonating. So I, yeah, I mean, I go back and look at
a whole bunch of tweets that were just like into the void. No one was, no one was reading.
And I think sharing that like sharing, hey, here's what I'm thinking about X versus here's
how to do X. So I think you can just share what you're like, hey, here's what I'm thinking
about or here's something I've noticed, right? Like I've worked with a number of clients
and I keep seeing why like show that you are recognizing patterns and that you're seeing
certain trends, even if you're again, a beginner, but just sharing that thinking is what is
going to start to put those, you know, that, that resonance out there.
I love that, that just like slight twisting of the phrase. Cause if you're a perfectionist
or you're someone who's like got a lot of anxiety about how people will perceive you.
Well, if you phrase things as here's how to do X, like you've now raised the bar tremendously
on what you need to share and you're going to be paralyzed because you can't live up
to that. And also to Andrew's point about just putting out content and tweaking the
cool thing about being a YouTuber or a tweeter or a podcast or a blogger is like, most people
aren't even going to look at your early stuff.
Like no one's scrolling down your Twitter timeline to see what you were tweeting a bunch
like years ago. Like you just like put stuff out there, see how it resonates and like ideally
don't lock yourself into one plan right at the beginning. Like your podcast, if you have
a podcast should change over time and it should get better and better over time. And it doesn't
matter if you start off pretty crappy. And so it's another easy way I think to get started.
By giving yourself some leeway to not have to start with perfection.
I don't know how many years ago it was, but I was just terrified to be on video. Like
I never wanted to do client calls or anything. I was like, just let's operate by email. Like
I was really, really afraid of being visible in any way, shape or form, but I knew that
was going to hold me back in business. And I think I started with a hundred hundred
day project. I don't know if you've heard about it, but you pick one thing to do every
day for a hundred days. And so I did a video blog. I posted those to YouTube. I posted
them on Instagram and I left them up because they are awkward AF. And I wanted people to
see this is a learnable skill. Like you can learn to speak on stage. You can learn to
get comfortable in video. Seems like it's a lot easier for some people than others for
sure. And people are like, Oh, but you seem so comfortable. I'm like, Oh my gosh, I've
hired speaking coaches. I've done these crazy challenges. I sign up for acting classes like
you name it. I have done everything because I knew this was a skill I needed to work on.
And I wanted people to know that I wanted them to know it's not just that there are
people that are very comfortable and they're just naturally amazing on stage. And there's
the rest of us. These are skills that we can learn. And so I wanted people to be able to
see that trajectory. I get notes from people all the time being like, Oh wow, I went back
and watched video one or I watched video 14. I'm like, Oh, it's, it's cringy, but it needs
to, it needs to be there for people as a reminder that we are all on a journey. We are progressing
at our own pace and there's room for everybody to improve whatever that looks like for you.
So I want to try an abstract question here to sort of close this out. I'm curious, like
what mental models, what philosophies, uh, what ideas do you all have that drive your
work in life? And it doesn't have to be related to course creation. It could just be any sort
of broad idea. So I'll start just as an example. I really like this idea from Charlie Munger
about having a sort of lattice work of higher level ideas that you can hang specific things
on. So the way he describes it is it's really hard to remember a hundred little facts, but
it's easier to remember like a small number of facts from which you can derive other things.
So if I think about a business, for example, I just think of four words, like what problem
is it solving? What's the distribution channel? What's the business model and what's the product?
And from those four words, I can basically create like a thousand little questions for
each one of those that help me analyze a business. I don't have to remember a whole bunch of
different stuff. So I try to take that with me to every part of life and I find it to
be super useful. What models do you all have? You know, what are things you've learned or
read that have really stuck with you?
So it's funny, I think my one is sort of also in this space a little bit. I've been thinking
a lot about destination and journey groups and sort of applying that to my own personal
life as well. Constantly kind of going between action, action, action and sort of alignment
with where I'm headed. And that's something I've already started like doing more intentionally
this year, actually ended last year this year as things just start to get so much busier
now and basically running two companies like got a one-year-old kid, I just have to do
this. And just so that you know that when you're executing, executing, executing, you're
actually on the path that you want to be on and it's aligned with what you want to be.
So the journey, you clear what the destination is and then you just focused on the journey
and sort of all the things that come with that, bringing people in and like making relationships
and all that sort of stuff.
Sean Peery has a good idea called know your A-B-Zs, like A where you are, B your next
step and Z like where you want to end up. And if you sort of lose sight of any of those,
you might end up way off path.
My whole mental model for things is just trying to enjoy the journey as much as possible.
If I find that I'm not having fun doing anything, then not everything can be fun 100% of the
time. But if it's very not fun for an extended amount of time, then usually there's a sign
that something is wrong. Either it's a destination that's not meaningful to me, or more likely
I'm kind of approaching it. I'm choosing to approach it in a way that is just not conducive
to having fun.
And in particular, one, one thing that I'm very bullish on is setting input goals rather
than outcome goals. Input goals meaning I'm just going to make two videos a week, outcome
goal being like, I want to get X number of subscribers or I'm in the process of writing
a book at the moment. And I really want it to hit the New York Times bestseller list.
But anytime I think about it, it just gets so depressing. And I hate the thought of writing
the book. Whereas I try and rewire my brain to think, nope, not going to care about that.
If it happens, it'll happen. But otherwise, you know, the thing I'm going to care about
is I want to write a book that I'm proud of, which is an input goal, it's in my control.
So that just helps me enjoy the journey rather than being fixated on the destination.
I love it. Well, Ali, Andrew, Marie, thank you for coming on the show, dropping some
gems about course creation. I would love for you to let the audience know where they can
go to find out more about the courses you're working on about the on deck course creation
fellowship. Andrew, maybe you want to start.
If you go to be on deck.com in the top menu, you'll find course creators. We've actually
closed depending on when this is released. Actually, we close now for the first cohort,
but we were running two or three cards a year. And so people can get on the waitlist there.
And if you want to talk to me specifically about it on Twitter at Bazaruto, B-A-Z-Z-A-R-U-T-O,
I love getting DMs from people who are passionate teachers and course creators, and I answer
all of them. So that's the best place.
You can find me online at MariePoulin.com. Or if you're curious about the course, NotionMastery.com.
Pretty active on Twitter or Instagram or YouTube if you're looking for Notion related content.
So you can pretty much Google my name. I've got all the handles.
Yeah. And same for me. If you just Google my name, you'll find a website or YouTube
channel. And through there, you'll find links to the Parkman YouTuber Academy if you're
interested in signing up. Our next cohort is probably going to be in, like, June. So
June 2021. So depending on when you're watching this, I would love to have you.
All right. Thanks, everybody.