What we cut from the five-day course

Our free course is five trainings long. The first version was much longer, and cutting it taught us more about course design than building it did. Since every coach here faces the same decisions, it seems worth showing the working.

The first outline opened with a walkthrough of the platform — where things live, what the tabs do. It was accurate, it was well made, and it was the wrong first lesson, because nobody signs up to learn a menu. They sign up because they have something to teach and no course.

The general rule it produced: never open with your tool. Open with the work. The tool becomes obvious the moment the student needs it, and mystifying if they meet it before.

Version one ran ten days and covered launching, pricing and the follow-up emails as well. Ten days is a long time to hold someone's attention for free, and the last five days were about decisions you can't make until the course exists.

So the course now ends the moment the artifact exists — an outline and a recorded training — and the rest became its own material. Ending at a real finish line beats covering everything, because a course that ends is a course people complete.

The tempting version of each day's action was a checkbox: done, next. We kept written answers instead, and a person reads them.

Two reasons. Writing a sentence forces a decision that clicking never does — a lot of people discover their course idea is actually two ideas at exactly this point. And on our side, the answers are the only honest signal of where the course is confusing. A checkbox tells you someone clicked.

The trainings release a day apart, timed from when each person joins rather than from a fixed calendar. Somebody who starts on a Thursday gets day three on Sunday.

It's tempting to read that as a retention trick. The actual reason is that day two's work is better when day one's sentence has been sitting in someone's head overnight. The pacing is pedagogical; any retention is a side effect.