I Spent 300 Hours Making A Course - Was It Worth It?

Sep '23 in Wins🏆

I've been running my web design business for about 7 years now. I bought the domain when I was 18, but I wouldn't say I've been taking it too seriously until about a couple years ago. I was in university for most of that time.

About a year ago, I think I was partly inspired by this group to start creating a course. It's crazy to see how far it's come from the rough drafts I had, but I also wish I had opted for a smaller course scope to start out with. I made a lot of mistakes over this process, but that's probably been my biggest.

The course centers around using Squarespace to make a strong website for service-based business owners - but it expanded to include ChatGPT and Midjourney for website content, SEO and Copywriting advice as well as AI tools that help you do those, and some other things including offer creation.

When creating it, I envisioned in my mind the middle-aged small business owners in my networking group that I've been a part of for 4 years, and thought about how if they don't get tech-savvy, their businesses will just cease to exist in 5-10 years. They have to learn the fundamentals, and then hire someone to execute on those fundamentals (and I have a video on how to hire a good freelancer on Upwork).

Us small business owners need to upgrade our understanding of technology in order to stay competitive in this digital transition period, and I hope I can play a small but significant role in this 'fight' over this decade.

Money-wise, I don't know if this course was worth it - time will tell. I certainly put in a lot of work time wise and at least $3000 money-wise in VA costs, and I could have been doing a lot more pressing work such as getting clients and upgrading systems in my business. What was worthwhile about this course - is a couple things:

1) Forced me to solidify my understanding of many rarely-used components of my service that I can now comfortably include in a holistic product. For example - using ChatGPT for content is huge, because getting text from clients has and always will be the no.1 sticking point for web designers. Sure, they still need to give input, but I can literally get on a zoom call with them, ask them questions, otter.ai transcribes it, and then ChatGPT puts together a 80% finished draft that I then edit. That's one of dozens of little examples of how this course improved my thinking of the systems behind my business. Sure, people can pay $119 to get a lot of the secrets/systems info- but they can also pay us $5000 to do it for them and this course is a key step behind consistently delivering $5000 websites that knock the socks off of clients (10x value)

2) I can use it as a lead generation tool. "Oh you don't have 20 hours to take this course? You can just hire my agency"

3) It's a launch point for my Skool group - which is something I've been wanting to make since last year when I heard about it. I really believe in Skool and see it becoming massive in the next few years.

4) It's a launch point for my YouTube channel and more broadly my content - I started it back up a few months ago so I'd have something on there by the time the course came out, and I'll be posting regularly now. I already have a video that got 5000 views - although most are around the 100 view mark. But I'm slowly figuring out content - and I think all of us here can agree content is king!

Am I allowed to share the link by the way? I'm making this post both to answer questions and give advice to people who are where I was 1 year ago, as well as to see if I can get some advice from more experienced Synthesizers.

Now that the course is out, it is by no means finished, and there's a lot of extra work like my Skool group tied to the course as well as future sections to film and re-film that I have to execute on. Feedback on both the course material as well as course marketing strategy would be MASSIVELY appreciated.

P.S. I went Alex-Hormozi-mode and decided to launch the course on my birthday- today.

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