113 | Don't build a course until someone's paid for it

0:00 Hi there. Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I'm an herbalist and nutritionist, and in this podcast, I share tips, tidbits, and resources that might be helpful for other practitioners. Now, if you are listening to this around the time that it is released, it is summertime. And in summertime, I have noticed that a lot of practitioners have a surge of creative energy, and they get ideas to create new programs and courses and things like that. I have done a reasonable amount of writing and podcasting and sharing my thoughts about creating online courses and programs and things like that.

0:41 And I'm not going to rehash all of that here right now, but what I do want to remind you is that if you have an idea for a brilliant program or a new way that you want to do things, I strongly encourage you not to create that whole thing before you have interest. And I don't mean interest as in, oh yeah, that sounds great, or that sounds really interesting, I'd love to know more. I mean somebody who has signed up to pay you money for this thing. I can't even keep track of the number of people I have met with over the years who have come to me and said, I had this great idea.

1:23 I spent so much time and money and love and energy creating a course or a program of some sort. I put it all together. I recorded the videos. I signed up for audio editing tools, all these different things. I spent all this time making the website and connecting the buttons and thinking through the assignments and the homework, and nobody bought it. Or one person bought it. And it was dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of hours that went into creating the thing. And I, first of all, if that has happened to you, I'm so sorry. I know it's really hard because it seems so powerful and it seems like, oh, this is really crafted with a lot of love and thought and care.

2:10 And it just seems like people would sign up for it. And what I want to remind you in this episode is sometimes we have these ideas and what sounds amazing to us is just not what our people need or want right now. And it just doesn't make sense to spend so much time putting something together until you have a good sense that somebody is interested in it. Okay, so I like to think about the first round of anything like this as a process of co-creation versus you building on your own in a silo without any, input or that flow of energy back and forth between you and the people who are going to take the program or sign up for the course or whatever it is.

2:56 We need that co-creative, generative, back and forth in order to make it something that's really good. Okay? So what we want to do instead is if you do have this idea and you're like, wow, I wonder what would happen if I did some sort of course thing and people could add on one-on-one visits or whatever. You know, I want to teach this course about how to meal prep for busy families. I don't know. Whatever the things are that are your ideas that you think, yes, this could be great. When you feel that surge of energy and you're like, oh, I'm going to start putting it together. I'm going to start fleshing it out. I'm going to start, you know, planning, planning my different modules and I'm going to look into course platforms and this, that and the other.

3:38 That's a moment to pause to say, Oh, okay, I feel a lot of energy for this thing. Let me just make sure that I'm not alone. Because there's sometimes things where we get all excited about it. And again, not everybody, or maybe no other people, are on board with it right now. So instead of making the whole thing, and then putting it out there and hoping some people show up, the if you build it, they will come," philosophy, so to speak. What I want you to do is create a very, very basic overview of your idea, maybe on just a plain document. A Word doc, a Google doc, whatever, Notion, whatever you use.

4:18 Just create an outline of what you're thinking and a tentative price, and put that out there and be like, Hey, I have this idea. I think it's going to work really well. It's still new. I want to know if anybody is on board. And if you would be interested in doing this starting next month, the price would be this. There would be a $50 deposit or something. I don't know. I'm just making this up price-wise. Let me know. Sign up here. Email me back. I want you to make this as easy as possible for you and for the people who might be interested. You don't need to create a sales page. You don't need to create the program out in Practice Better or Kajabi or whatever else you're thinking about using, just start as simple as possible.

5:02 What is what they call in business terms the minimum viable product? That you could do, that you could deliver this and get feedback along the way, see what people are interested in, see what times work for them, see what dates work for them, help them, you know, have them help you determine which topics they really want to know more about. Let their questions from one week or one month guide you as you create the following month, right? So what we're looking at as something where we're essentially building the plane as we're flying it, so to speak, although not quite so dangerously. That's what we're going for. And I am a huge fan of those types of projects. You will find either you'll put your amazing idea out there and you'll be like, hey, here's what I'm thinking. This is a pilot price. It's, you know, it'll probably be more expensive the next time I run it, but because I've never done it before and because I'm going to be asking for feedback along the way, this is the price for now.

5:55 If nobody signs up for it in that moment and you're doing the best job that you know how to do promoting it, that is a sign to you that people aren't ready for this right now. You want to put it in your back pocket, keep it in your practice notebook, file it away somewhere for a future time. But for right now, that is a sign that it's not going to be the best use of your time and money. If you need help marketing it and sharing more about it, that's a podcast for a different day. Definitely work with somebody on that. But realistically, if you use all the channels that you have available to you and people don't sign up for it, it's just not, it's not the time to do it. On the other hand, if you put it out there and people seem interested, you get a small handful of folks, maybe five, I would say, could be the minimum for something like this. Let's say you get five people and you're like, great, this seems good.

6:43 Then I want you to build it again in the easiest possible way. So maybe that would look like I'm going to create unlisted YouTube videos and send them out via email every Monday or the first of every month or use whatever tools you already have. We're not buying new things. We're not making this harder or fancier than it needs to be. We're thinking, what is the easiest and quickest way I can help these people. Get to what I think they're here to do. That's what you're going to do. And then you can make it fancier and repeatable and all of that after the first round. Okay? So that's my friendly summertime advice for folks who have a surge of energy or an aha moment about creating a new program or offering of some sort, especially if it's a group thing.

7:27 Please, please, please let people sign up for it and put a deposit down or pay for it first before you start creating it or before certainly before you get further than a week or two, of content created and then co-create the first round through and then after that you can make something fancier bigger better and spend more time finalizing it later on, okay i hope your summer is filled with creative ideas both for your practice and outside of your practice. Have an amazing time this summer doing fun things, being outside, and so forth. If you want to stay in touch, I would love to send you my Practitioner Notes newsletter that goes out every Thursday.

8:08 You can sign up for it at camillefreeman.com or intheclinic.com, and hopefully I'll be able to send that to you on Thursday. All right, I'll be back soon. Have a lovely day, and thank you for the work that you do.