– Sven from Cape Town (@svensteffens)
There are huge businesses built on all three models – so it's hard to say definitively that one is better than another. And it's easy to imagine a world where you're doing all three simultaneously, so why not just jump straight to the end?
Well, this question makes two major assumptions:
- You have a skill you've mastered
- You know how to teach others to master that skill, too
That's a big IF, though – being good at doing something doesn't guarantee that you'll be good at teaching it.
For that reason, I typically recommend a linear progression for developing educational products:
- Teach it live (group coaching or cohort-based course)
- Produce a self-paced version
- Offer both options to students
Teach it live
Starting with a group coaching program or a cohort-based course has several benefits:
Higher perceived value
When real-time, direct access to you is a part of a product, the perceived value of that product increases. Your time is scarce, but a digital recording of you is not. So we often see the low end of live programs priced in the mid-hundreds of dollars (vs. self-paced courses often being sold for <$100 each).
More meaningful revenue
Because the perceived value is higher, a live program can generate more meaningful revenue with fewer sales. When you're starting and have a smaller audience, this makes reaching your minimum viable revenue easier.
Tight feedback loop
When you're teaching to a live audience, you get a lot more information about that curriculum. You'll see what's resonating, where people get lost, and where questions come up. This feedback comes in the form of student questions but also their behavior. You'll see their body language and where their eyes light up or glaze over.
This is a GOLDMINE for improving both your curriculum and your ability to deliver it. With a self-paced course, you miss all of this. And trust me – your first attempt at the curriculum will NOT be as good as it could be!
Better student outcomes
Because you'll be able to see (or hear) where students get stuck in real time, you'll have an opportunity to intervene and get them unstuck while they're still motivated. When we get stuck in a self-paced course, we're usually left to our own devices to figure it out – but live courses provide an outlet to get that personalized support. As a result, more students will succeed.
Sell now and build in real-time
If you're brave, you can sell and start running the program before it's even completed. If you're able to produce your curriculum on the fly week-to-week before your live sessions, you can start selling your program tomorrow.
This is a bit of a highwire act! If you aren't absolutely confident you can deliver under pressure and tight deadlines, you should probably spend time developing the curriculum before you get started. But in either case, the ability to make edits and tailor your curriculum in real time to your students is magical.
Produce a self-paced version
You should run this live program several times. Tiago Forte told me that he didn't hit his stride with Building A Second Brain until his tenth cohort!
You'll find that there's no real limit to your capacity to improve the course – but at some point, you'll reach a clear 80/20.
When you're no longer improving the curriculum itself, you have the opportunity to produce it in the form of a self-paced course. At this point, it should be tested and have delivered outcomes for several students – which will help you produce a high-quality sales page, too.
Self-paced courses give you an asset that scales infinitely, but you'll likely need to price it lower than the group program. It may even cannibalize some of your group program sales. But if you're interested in winding down the live program at some point, this is the way to go.
Online Course Masterclass
With this masterclass, I'll share with you the template I use for planning and creating my course and teach you how to use it.
Offer both options to students
Even if the core curriculum is the same between a live program and self-paced course, the live version still has the added value of YOU being there. The live version may offer levels of personal support that the self-paced version does not.
So, if you enjoy doing the live program, you could sell both.
While the live program will need to be on a schedule (and thus lend itself well to launches), the self-paced version can be evergreen, giving you a best-of-both-worlds situation.
You don't even need more than one sales page – sell the value of the curriculum (the outcome of the course) and then offer two different methods of delivery:
- A self-paced version available instantly
- A live cohort version offered occasionally
There's even a design called a "high-ticket hybrid" (dubbed by Mariah Coz) where you sell a 12-month program that grants immediate access to the self-paced curriculum with ongoing support provided via a community platform and/or live calls. That looks and feels a little bit more like a membership than a course.
Conclusion
Instead of picking one delivery format over another, most creators would be well-served to start by offering a live program, even if they don't intend to offer it into perpetuity. From a product development perspective, it's more efficient and more profitable in the immediate term. By setting yourself up to provide better student outcomes from the beginning, you'll get more word of mouth, too.
