A Bit About Me & A Warning About Online Courses

As you read this you may be a bit surprised at how obvious some of my failures or are why I seem to shy away from pushing things further or doubling down on trying to make more money.

Throughout this entire journey I was on a broader exploration of how one might design a life not centered around work. While I’ve seen clear opportunities to make more money at several points along the journey, I almost always optimized for a simpler life and more time to write and do the things that bring me alive.

The creation of courses and coaching were downstream of many years of intense coaching and consulting work as well as hundreds of conversations and thousands of hours of writing about these topics. For the most case, I created these courses after I had some validation that people were struggling with these things and that I had some sense that my way of thinking about these issues was helpful for people.

I see many people aiming at creating courses without first finding the things that they enjoy doing or directly helping people first. The following journey is a five year journey and knowing what I know now I’m a bit embarrassed by how poor some of my thinking and decisions were at the beginning of this journey.

I am sharing my journey below of creating digital content and several online courses and meeting mixed success along the way. I am not the most successful or the flashiest online course creator but I am in it for the long-term, really care about doing these things in a lasting way and want to see others find ways to create their own work.

I write this with the intention of saving you some time on your own journey.

Chapter 1: Idea For A Resume Course

It was 2015. I had decided to dabble in my first side gig as a career coach. Careers with Paul was born and I started writing and sharing what I knew publicly. 

When you decide to call yourself a “career coach” everyone wants help with their resumes. After helping 100 people I decided I couldn’t do 101.

Inspired by the Massive Online Open Course movement and learning about things like Udemy, I thought I might dabble with creating an online course. 

My background in consulting blessed me with the ability to create content quickly and to be able to have a good sense for how to sequence and structure that knowledge. Over the course of a few weeks I created a bunch of slide:

Lesson #1: Creating content with the intention of teaching others enables you to learn something in a much deeper way than simply “knowing” how to do something. I had helped many people with resumes but never approached it by thinking about how to clearly explain what I was doing and why. Creating the resume course forced me to sharpen my thinking, develop an easy to understand framework, and actually helped me get better at what I wanted to teach

I bought my first microphone, a Blue Snowball ICE and set out to record voiceovers with the slides. Given that I was still employed and working with my work computer, I didn’t do any video. For me, I just wanted to ship this thing and get it out there.

I had all sorts of roadblocks and issues with recording voiceovers as well as audio and video editing. When you are first starting never discount how much time you will spend tinkering and fixing really minor things.

Chapter 2: Getting Rich!

Just kidding. 

I posted the course on Udemy in May 2016 and I ended up making $30–$40 in that first year.

While I didn’t expect to make a lot of money, I was surprised at how little you could make on a platform like Udemy. Udemy controls a lot of the pricing and even if you priced something at $20, they might sell it at a discount of $0.99. Not really the kind of platform that’s going to support your life.

I did make my first paycheck from selling things online which was a huge confidence boost as I was thinking about potentially leaving my job.

Overall I was still pretty proud that I was able to create and launch something on my own after having my work tightly controlled by overzealous managers for the previous decade in my consulting jobs. 

I ended up using this as something I could send to anyone who asked for resume help too, which felt pretty good. 

At this point I was still thinking a lot about the depth of materials, the quality of video and audio and the “features” of a course. This led me to want to upgrade the content and make it a little more visually appealing and also to upgrade the audio voiceovers. I have a lot of fun messing with content so I thought this was a fun use of time. 

Lesson #2: It doesn’t matter how good your slides or course are if you are competing on a massive platform where there are 25 other resume courses who are priced at $0.99. Udemy was a great place for some early adopters but probably wasn’t a great place long term if I wanted to make money.

At this point I was still thinking of a course as something that could be consumed asynchronously and as a potential passive income product. I was aiming at helping someone make a change but had still not thought about a LIVE cohort-based course until I stumbled upon Seth Godin’s altMBA.

Chapter 3: “Digital Course Experience”

I’m not sure when I first heard about the altMBA but I remember thinking that this was definitely something that needed to exist. 

I was in my first year of self-employment and discovering that although I had worked in some of the best companies in the world, the skills I had developed were inadequate to creating my own work. I had always written or created things to please others and now I was figuring out how to channel my curiosity into something different.

I talked to alums like Cody Royle who credited the program with enabling him to write his own book. He found the support of others and the focus on creating your own work transformation and for only $2,000 at the time it felt like this might be more promising than the two years and $100,000 I spent on business school.

In 2018 I had started creating and was inspired by Godin’s general advice to focus on finding the people who want your help and to do it with generosity. I took this approach and announced to my newsletter that I was going to launch a “LIVE” course called “Solopreneur Shift” and let people sign up using a pay-what-feels right approach. This felt right in terms of balancing generosity and dealing the the terrifying fear of charging people money for the first time. Here is the announcement from my newsletter:

I paired this with a landing page which mapped out my vision of the course. 

To my surprise I ended up getting eight people to signup up at a mix of different price points. A few people paid the full tuition price (>$300!) which felt both amazing and terrifying. “These people really believe in me, wow!” and “Holy crap, can I do this?”

Here’s a secret you should know: I only built about 20% of the content before “launching”

I don’t recommend this for everyone. My superpowers are creating content and figuring out how to fit different ideas together. I knew that getting signups would be rocket fuel to motivate me to build the course, which turned out to be true.

Instead I focused on getting the sequence and structure of the course right and making sure it made sense to others:

Lesson #3: The biggest motivator for me is helping other people and getting people to pay me up front for a course was the biggest motivation in the world to not let them down. It was also terrifying and there’s probably not a good way to fast-track this step. It’s just something you’ll need to figure out how to power through.

A side note: Traditional vs. Online Courses

In this same summer At this time I was also a Teacher’s Assistant for a class at MIT for the MBA program, helping out a professor I knew. I found it striking to compare this kind of Professor-at-the-front type of “school” with my digital course which was interactive, collaborative, enthusiastic and part of an ongoing conversation on Slack. Many of the MIT students were interested in figuring out what they had to do to barely pass the class while the participants in my digital course were craving a transformation and really wanted to improve their live.

Chapter 4: Dreaming Bigger

Coming off this successful course experiment I was excited. I had made about $2,000 and was convinced that I was on to something. The online course felt alive whereas the class I was helping out with at MIT felt like it was from another era.

While I had given up on making money from my resume course, I made it free and kept it on Udemy and forgot about it. Out of the blue, I received the following graphic in an e-mail that made my brain explode. People from 94 countries had taken the course, what?!

This is when I started to realize that the opportunity of online education might be a lot bigger than simply training Americans in my backyard. 

Online courses shifted from something that I saw as a fun experiment to something that I wanted to place a bigger bet on for the future.

Chapter 5: “Strategy Toolkit”

My background before I quit my job was working in the strategy consulting industry for nine years from 2008 to 2017. One of the things I loved while working in the industry was taking extra time to participate in developing content and leading trainings for new hires and colleagues, teaching them the “consulting process.” 

In addition to this, I had started advising an undergraduate consulting group and over a few years had figured out how to backwards engineer a lot of the things I had learned and explain and train them in a way that was making a real different in their skills.

So when I went solo I thought that one thing I might do was to lead internal company trainings and I did exactly that as one of my gigs in the first year. I helped to design and lead a training for first year analysts at a software consulting firm. This was a month before I ran “Solopreneur Shift,” however, and I had never imagined that I might do this online. 

After Solopreneur Shift, I changed my mind about consulting trainings and quickly adapted some of the ideas for a virtual setting. I ended up moving to Taiwan in the fall of that year and when my consulting work evaporated and I was rested after an extended period of non-doing mode, I decided that I would embark on what I was then calling The Strategy Toolkit.

The first thing I did was to purchase a year subscription to Teachable (affiliate) which felt quite bold at the time for someone that had made less than $1,000 in three months. However, what it was was a bet on myself and a way of raising the stakes to guarantee that I would follow through.

I’m a bit embarrassed by the first iteration of the course but not about the Ninja.

I launched this after a steady month of creating and shipping and I got rich!

Just kidding, again.

I sold a few copies of the course to friends that believed in me and then considered it a failure. I stopped thinking about it for a bit and assumed that it might be time to move on from this dream of being involved in online courses. 

Chapter 6: Re-Branding As StrategyU + Think Like A Strategy Consultant

A month before I left my job a company flew me out to Los Angeles to have a conversation about leading an Academy that would help train consultants. I told them that I thought we should go virtual and call it “StrategyU.” They wanted me to merely be a salesperson for the course. They already had the materials and they thought people don’t want virtual trainings. I said no and left to self-employment a month later.

Fast forward 18 months later and I had created my own consulting course but I had launched it under “BoundlessU” which was the home of my main blog. As I mentioned, I had figured this might earn me some money here and there but that it was a lost cause. I was hoping merely to recover the $39 a month teachable fee. 

I moved to Bali after my failed launch and luckily I was joined by Jay a freelance digital marketer who quickly made me realize I was a marketing moron (he’s since moved on to launch a woodworking business in Colorado). He was really impressed with the course and believed in what I had. Simply seeing him excited about it was encouraging. It made me want to pick it up and give it another go. Together we brainstormed four things I would do immediately:

#1 Video: Shoot high quality videos introducing myself and giving more of a personal explanation why this course mattered to me and how the pieces fit together along the way

#2 New Brand and Course Name: Move the consulting articles I had written off my main blog and on quora to a separate site, which I planned to call StrategyU and change the course to “Think Like A Strategy Consultant” to more clearly communicate the shift I was selling. I had the advantage of already having SEO traffic of many of these already as well as many other “validated” posts I had written on Quora that received a lot of attention, including a post upvoted by Ramit Sethi which gave me another confidence boost.

#3 Give away high-quality content: Create a lot of valuable content for people to get an understanding of what kind of skills I was teaching in my course

#4 Free e-mail course: Create an e-mail signup and create a multi-day free e-mail course previewing content in the course.

Excited by this second chance, I started writing like a maniac and had rebuilt the course and site within a few weeks.

By the end of April 2019, I landed my first sale of the course from a stranger on the internet and the excitement of having something that might work motivated me to keep working to improve the course. 

In that first month I ended up selling 10 copies of the course (which I was still pricing at $99) and was kind of shocked that my strategy had worked. Throughout the rest of the year I had a steady stream of sales.

It’s hard to understate how shocking this was to me and how much it shifted my attention away from working as a freelancer and towards the creator economy. I was equally excited to see that less than half of the course sales were from the US and the rest spanned across 23 other countries:

Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, UK, USA, Vietnam

Lesson #4: Digital products need some form of distribution. For me, SEO worked really well because this was an in-demand topic via google but other strategies like e-mail marketing, audience building on platforms like Twitter, and partnerships all seem to be viable strategies.

Chapter 7: My First Live Cohorts Of Think Like A Strategy Consultant

Although I was finding success with my course as an evergreen course, I wanted to run it as a cohort-based course to work directly with the students and use it as a way to keep improving and upgrading the course. 

In July 2019 I ran my first cohort to launch my first cohort and used this as an excuse to upgrade the course including adding challenging assignments and structuring it around a four-week cadence. This four-week schedule would pay bigger dividends down the road when I shifted it back to an evergreen course. 

I ran two cohorts and used a discord chat and also added a discourse forum. I enrolled about 10–15 people in each sessions and it went pretty well yet the entire time it felt like something was missing.

The biggest challenge about the cohorts was that almost everyone was a beginner in terms of the skills and they all wanted direct access to me and my feedback. It’s not easy for a novice to identify clear opportunities for improvement as easily as a novice might be able to point out opportunities in something like writing or speaking. 

After running two cohorts, I decided to shift the course back to an evergreen format with the new assignments and four-week structure. I created two clear options. One that was self-paced and another where they could work directly with me to get feedback.

• $429 “Consultant” — Self paced and minor feedback
• $699 “Partner” — Coaching Call + Feedback On Weekly Assignments

With this pricing and structure, I was in a great place when my target audience was forced to work remotely. This lead to a sustained spike in sales from April onward and for 2020, the course was able to fully support me and my wife’s life off, with more than $50,000 in revenue.

While I had made a decent amount of money in 2019 it was nothing like what happened in 2020 and for the first time I started to think that running online courses was something I could really lean into to support my life for the next several years.

Lesson #5: Just because “cohort-based courses” are all the buzz right now does not mean other models won’t work well for your course. I’ve been fascinated by the cohort-based course movement but I think there is room for a number of models to work with online courses.

Chapter 8: Re-launching “Solopreneur Shift” as “Reinvent”

While it was amazing to be gaining traction with my consulting course in 2019, I knew that the course I needed to put into the world was the updated version of solopreneur shift. Since I quit my job in 2017 I have been increasingly drawn to helping people navigate and make sense of this new world of work.

As someone that loves the act of creation, creating a course has the added benefit of forcing me to simplify, synthesize, and communicate my ideas for other people. While the course has only had minor success since I launched it, it has had an incredible downstream impact on my writing and the quality of my ideas, helping me reach many more people through my ideas in 2020.

I had learned my lesson of not validating my course before launching so this time I decided to build it in public, inspired by the approaches of people like Nat Eliason and Ryan Kulp who both took similar approaches with course.

For me this was a great strategy because it channeled my motivation for helping individuals as a push to “keep going.” By tweeting and sharing my progress, asking people for feedback and sharing my progress, I was able to passively sell 10–15 spots in the course before I had built most of the materials.

To raise the stakes for myself I also decided to invest in a $100 light and also signed up for Podia as a way to make another financial commitment. These small purchases seem to have the effect of committing me to following through and once I spend the money I am thinking about running the course as a micro-business where I need to earn back the initial investment. Your mileage may vary. .

The course was designed around a five-week structure and the biggest component was an “action challenge” that would require students to publishing something in week three. 

Several people launched things that they are still working on to this day which is pretty much all I could ask for.

(Side note: I have a much more detailed writeup of the process of creating this course on Podia’s site)

In October of 2019 I finished the course in time to spend a relaxing few days in Japan before I launched the cohort with 35 people from around the globe. I ran two different sessions for the different time zones, had a co-facilitator join me, more actively encouraged sharing in a Discord group and overall it is the best experience I’ve had running an online course. 

Creating and running this cohort of Reinvent was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done and although I haven’t run a proper cohort again (mostly due to health issues), I’m excited to potentially run it again in 2021 or 2022 or whenever I find someone that might be interested in re-launching it with me.

Lesson #6: Not every course has to be a monetary success. The biggest benefits for me in creating reinvent have been going much deeper in a number of topics I plan to keep writing about for many years in the future. In many ways creating this course helped me improve my thinking and writing and helped me build the courage to pursue writing a book in 2021.

Chapter 9: Gift Economy Approach

With all the material I’ve created I’ve always tried to integrate a gift economy approach. I’m not going to go in-depth here but my goal in creating is usually for my own selfish reasons of making sense of the world, joy of creation, and then if I’m lucky, helping others. I want as many people as possible to benefit regardless of how much money they have.

It’s taken a few iterations to get right but I have landed on an approach that seems to deter most people from taking advantage of the system and encourages people with less to apply.

Here is the current language I have on my site

This directs people to a small exercise where they can share their motivation and offer a “gift” that feels right. I nudge people to offer something because in previous iterations where I offered it for free no one finished the course!

Here is an example of some of the amazing applications I receive:

Nothing inspires me more than people with the motivation to learn from all parts of the world. I find over and over again that the people with the least are often the most hungry to learn and this makes me incredibly optimistic for the future.

Chapter 10: Ongoing Tweaks and Opportunities

The success of my consulting skills course has continued. At the end of 2020 I was offered a chance to take part in an accelerator program to re-launch the consulting course as a cohort-based course. While it was increasingly clear to me that I had a lot of upside potential, I decided against it and doubled down on making my course even stronger. I invested in experimenting with ads, learned how to upgrade my landing page (h/t to Julian’s guide here) and have continued to slowly upgrade videos and content based on student requests. 

At the beginning of 2020 I crossed $100k in total sales which would have been unbelievable two years earlier when I had all but given up on my course and also reached 300+ students in 36 countries

The money I’m making from this course is more than I need and for now I am spending time writing, learning Chinese, and writing a book. I might decide to take my courses to the next level at some point, but I’m not in a rush. 

That doesn’t mean I’ve ignored all opportunities. I recently kicked off the first cohort-version of my course with a small data consulting firm in the US and am hoping this turns into something I can run with more organizations in the years to come. My hunch is that running it within a single organization solves a lot of the challenges I had with running it with random people across the globe. Time will tell. 

With Reinvent, I’ve turned it into a self-paced course as well but there has not been much interest. I’ve more or less broken even on this experiment which I’m happy with because this is the material I enjoy the most. I’ve recently launched a high-end coaching version of the course which I’ve having a lot of fun doing with someone in Mexico right now.

I’ve had a ton of fun doing all of this and if I never made another dollar from online courses I would have zero regrets from any of this. I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve been able to to build a life and work doing things I enjoy doing and get paid for it. 

Lesson #7: While it can seem like there is a lot of pressure to capitalize on the zeitgeist immediately there is probably also a benefit in playing the long-game and building things in a way that are sustainable and in a way that integrate with how you want to live and work. It seems after five years of doing this that I’m down to keep exploring for another five and I’m excited to see where things go!

Hopefully this guide will help you do the same.

To Learn More & Some Links

If you’re interested in learning more about my courses you can check them out. I’m always open to hearing ideas, or suggestions and definitely open to hearing about ways we might be able to partner on something:

• StrategyU and Think Like A Strategy Consultant
• Reinvent Course

If you are interested in supporting my journey or launching your own course, you can check out my affiliate links for Podia, or Teachable. Here is more I’ve written on creating courses

• Launching a course in 30 days
• My review of Ali Abdaal’s course & online learning in general
• “Are online courses the future?”
• Gift economy thread
• Reinvent launch thread
• Online course journey thread

Some must-read links:

• Tiago Forte’s article on STEVEs and The Future of Online Education

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post My Five-Year Journey Creating, Launching, Failing & Succeeding With Online Courses appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

In the last 12 months I had a channel on YouTube go from about 500 subscribers to almost 9,000 subscribers. In that time I became eligible to monetize my channel and made about $2,000 from YouTube ads in 2020.

This captured my attention and I became a bit more fascinated with what was happening over in YouTube land. Maybe you’ve seen stories that young people want to be YouTube stars when they grow up. You laugh it off and go about your day but I think you are missing a major transformation in how we learn and share ideas.

YouTube is one of the most transformation educational channels we have right now. Across the world people are now teaching themselves Chinese, learning strategy consulting skills, figuring out how to repair a car, learning how to use new online tools and using videos to help explain what their teacher failed to during the day.

Go to any college campus and ask them how they learn the hardest material from their classes. Almost every student will tell you, “YouTube.”

The course revolution shifted in 2020 from a half-baked attempt from existing institutions to a bottoms-up explosion in creativity, options and possibility. Wile there were early examples like altMBA showing that cohort-based classes were possible, many people likely made the mistake of thinking, “oh well that’s Seth Godin, he can do that!”

However, in 2020 we saw people like Tiago Forte, who had already been bullish on online learning, started to take action on his ambitious vision for the space. He took his Building a Second Brain Course from something he was selling for $500 for something that cost as much as $5,000.

I was a bit skeptical when I saw these price hike but became quite optimistic when I saw how many more people seemed to be enthusiastic about joining. There was clearly a latent demand within the student he was already teaching that were saying “we want more, we want to be challenged more and we want more coaching.” 2020 also saw similar energy emerge around the Write of Passage course from David Perell (which inspired countless courses itself) and it seemed that finally the formula for making a cohort-based course work had been found.

(Side note: It will be funny to see mainstream institutions stumble upon these ideas in five years and publish reports about it!)

I think part of this is because 2020 helped break a lot of the common knowledge that said you have to go to an educational institution to “learn.” What people realized instead is that these universities are more in the credentialing and networking business than teaching people practical skills. With the explosion of the “new economy” people are rightly realizing that learning by doing is going to be both a meta-skill and a practical skill that will help them experiment faster than spending years at a formal school.

I think the evolution of these is going to dramatically disrupt the full-time MBA, but more on that another time.

Joining Ali Abdaal’s “Part-Time YouTube Academy”

If you’d like to take the course, you can learn more here: Part-Time Youtuber Academy (affiliate link).

Based on my accidental YouTube success I decided to enroll in another online course myself this fall. This was driven by a curiosity to see what I might learn from taking someone else’s course (I have been running two of my own for years but always good to learn by being a student).

It was also driven by my curiosity into Ali Abdaal’s path who I randomly met when him and his brother interviewed me for their Not Overthinking podcast (one of my favorites I’ve done) about our relationship with work.

Until some googling before the interview, I had no idea who Ali was and had only been having a conversation with his brother over a couple of months. An hour before we kicked off the podcast I saw he had almost a million followers on YouTube (what the ?!). He’s a doctor who started sharing his studying methods on YouTube and unexpectedly blew up in a huge way as he expanded his topics to the broader themes of productivity, learning and creating online.

The fascinating thing about this is how open and connected these spaces are right now. For a long time we needed access to institutions to learn and we needed to have the right credentials to even get accepted into such a place. Meaning most people never had a shot to learn the things they might want to learn.

With online courses the only thing you need is a passion and curiosity for something (and despite the high price tags, these can end up being a bigger bang for the buck for people that might go to grad school instead as well as the fact that many offer reduced rates for people from lower-income countries).

This isn’t an essay about Ali or online learning but I wanted to offer a few reflections from the first iteration of Ali’s Part-Time YouTube Academy as someone with a monetized YouTube channel but doesn’t exactly know what they are doing.

Course Overview: I know they are changing the course a bit for the next cohort and making it a bit longer but I think the general curriculum with remain the same. I thought the schedule of ideas and structure made a ton of sense and I was able to pay attention to the things I needed the most help with.

Seven Takeaways From The Course

#1 Financial commitment: It’s always great to have the desire to learn something, better to put some money on the line and force yourself to do what you say. The best online courses are the ones that nudge you into active creation and create an atmosphere that hels that happen though a positive spirit of generosity and enthusiasm. I’ve wanted to improve my abilities at video editing and get more help on YouTube but its not the thing I’m ever drawn to do in a structured way. Paying for a course helped me focus on it appropriately for a month without having to make a much larger commitment.

#2 New friends: My metric for committing to anything these days is a simple question, “can I make a great friend?” This course had a number of people with a spirit of curiosity, generosity and connection. which are exactly the people I want to meet. I met a ton of people and made a couple new connections that may turn into friends. However, I had a hard time trying to navigate the many lectures and announcements and engage in the Circle community in a way to really invest in them.

One recommendation I’d have for Ali is to pair people up directly with similar backgrounds or levels of experience as buddies or force people to make them in the first week of the course.

#3 Meeting other creators & finding inspiration: One of the hardest things about running an online business is that there are increasing ways to monetize or build a business. However, it can be easy to focus on the 3 or 4 which are most popular at the moment. While YouTube is “hot” right now it was also good to see how varied the interests were across all the different students and to see the businesses they are running outside of YouTube. I love being inspired to think in new ways based on what others are doing.

#4 Tech Skills: Many of the lectures provided some very practical tips on improving editing skills and also just basic techniques for how to connect more effectively with people on YouTube. I learned valuable new ideas about cover images, background audio or music, strategic use of b-roll, lighting techniques, blurred backgrounds, and other small tweaks that combined enabled me to start to understand the technical editing process at a deeper level.

#5 Feedback: One of the secret gems of this course which I did not expect was feedback from two of Ali’s current team members, Angus and Elizabeth. Both were able to provide helpful positive and critical feedback in a way that it seemed they really wanted to help people improve. I feel like getting feedback from someone like Angus, who is doing the work behind the scenes for Ali right now is just as valuable from someone like Ali or another top creator. In addition, the course also attracted many people with successful channels who offered feedback, praise and welcome encouragement.

#6 Actionable next steps: I didn’t attend most of the live lectures but skimmed through most of the videos and read most of the decks. The overall curriculum was very well-designed, and logical and every lecture has at least 1-2 nuggets which I was able to directly apply to my homework for the week.

#7 Ali, Himself: I’ve been lucky to get to know Ali a bit over the last year and am excited to get to know him more. He could easily market his courses as “How to get 1 Million YouTube Subscribers” but he didn’t take that path. He really cares about giving people an honest and nuanced perspective on what it takes to be successful on YouTube and how other skills you have from other domains are just as important as pure video skills.

His ability to remain calm, approachable and curious throughout the course seemed to give a lot of people confidence and created a positive community vibe. Despite his humility, Ali is clearly some sort of super-learner that operates at very high levels (this became clear to me when he had internalized and was teaching effectively half of what I learned in my high-priced MBA). The way he combines his deep expertise with an approachable humility makes this course feel like you are getting a steady dose of encouragement from your grandmother (and I mean this in the best way possible).

Based on my own priorities and learning objectives here is how I would rate the course:

• Ideas for future online courses I run: 6/10 (I’m probably a bit more experienced than most but still picked up a ton of subtle best practices)
• A space for feedback & technical improvement: 10/10 (crazy how 7-8 pieces of feedback from experts can make a huge difference)
• Making meaningful connections with others: 4/10 (this is mostly my own fault but probably the biggest opportunity in their next cohort)
• Confidence boost for future video ideas & projects: 10/10
• Ideas for future videos and new uses of video: 7/10

Note: I took the first cohort of the course and I

This course was a great experience but it made me more confident that focusing on YouTube was not something I wanted to prioritize for 2021

A lot of what I do online is centered around building connections and making friends while building a life doing the things I want to be doing.

Right now I find that if I were to orient more towards YouTube it would be purely very focused on getting a wider reach and/or making more money in a way that feels a bit too instrumental for me. Additionally, I found the process of making a video a bit draining compared to something I love a lot more, writing. I love writing because of how easily it inspires people to reach out and start a conversation. I found that on YouTube there hasn’t been much depth to the conversations if any at all.

Despite this, I was able to dramatically level up my confidence and skills in video editing and I gained a new perspective on how to tell stories in different forms. I’m excited to put these skills to use in making the occasional videos for fun as well as helping others get started on their own creative journeys.

Ideal Student: If I were to describe an ideal person to take this course it would be someone who has already started creating online in some way (either writing, YouTube, newsletters, instagram, TikTok), has some idea of their interests and has some evidence that others want this information. Overall Ali really cares about helping people understand what success on YouTube looks like and gave a very accurate perspective on the different levels of success one can aim for. In order to get the most out of the course I recommend you have about 10-15 hours a week to focus on shooting, editing and publishing to get the most out of the course.

If you’d like to take the course, you can learn more here: Part-Time Youtuber Academy (affiliate link).

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post What I learned in Ali Abdaal’s YouTube Course appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Two years ago I moved to Asia and “default to remote” went from a nice idea to the only option to continue to with my consulting business. In addition, it gave me useful constraints that forced me to think more deeply about how to build a lasting life and work by creating and working digitally.

Over that time, I’ve worked in many different ways with Zoom as the central tool I’ve used. This includes:

• Four multi-week cohorts for my online courses, Reinvent and Think Like A Strategy Consultant with anywhere from 5 to 25 people
• 1-on-1 Coaching
• Over 150+ Curiosity Conversations
• 1-on-1 Consulting & Presentation Coaching
• Running my podcast, Reimagine Work, via virtual interviews

So what follows is a working list of some of what I’ve learned. I’m going to assume that you are using Zoom, though many of the principles and options are very similar in other tools such as Skype, Slack & Whereby. 

But first, welcome to what I see as the inevitable future of work — a future that is built on being remote and distributed and gives people more space to live and design their life.

None of this is easy, but I find that many people have a hard time “going back” once they’ve adapted to working online. Best of luck as you embrace this shift towards virtual collaboration and send me any additional tips you might have.

Nail The Basics – Four Tips Before You Dive In

#1 Get Used To Video Being On

I’ve worked with many people that refuse to use video even when most other people are using it. I get it, you don’t look your best or you don’t want to look at yourself on the screen.

However, having your video on focuses your attention and keeps you from surfing the web or checking your e-mail (a little bit at least!)

Research from UCLA has shown that while not as good as an in-person, video communication is better than audio and text communication for “affiliation cues” a predictor of bonding.

This study was done in 2013 when failed video calls were probably more the norm than the exception. I would not be surprised if video chat creeps closer and closer to in-person connection over the next decade.

Another finding from the same study was that “those who used video chat more frequently reported greater bonding with friends through video chat,” meaning that the more you get used to video communication, the better it will be.

#2 Practice troubleshooting

No matter how many video calls you’ve been on, at some point your speaker and microphone will decide to take the day off. The key in this situation is to have a couple backup options ready and to know where to look to fix the problem. 

When I launch a zoom meeting, I always go to the sound options and select my external microphone and external headphones. This is the setup I prefer as at minimizes background noise and delivers a high-quality sound to the other person.

Don’t forget to check your keyboard or sound options in the tray to see if you’ve muted your own microphone or speakers. Many people often forget the simplest option. 

Finally, if nothing works, consider the always handy restart to let the computer sort itself out.

#3 Consider Upgrading Your Equipment

Having a good video camera and microphone can dramatically improve the experience of a conversation for the other participants. Being able to clearly hear you and see you will help others stay engaged in the event. 

If your computer doesn’t have a nice video camera, you might want to consider buying a simple external camera. Here are my recommendations:

• Cheap and good: Logitech C310 (about $35)
• More expensive and even better: Logitech C922 (about $100)

In terms of microphones, there are a lot of good options, including the standard Apple wired earpods. I personally use a more expensive microphone because I also use it for podcasting. Here are some recommendations from my own use and friends:

• Airpods or Earpods
• Jabra Evolve 40 single ear or double ear options ($70 or $100)
• Audio Technica 2100x USB microphone ($100) — my podcast mic

If you are using wired earphones: Here is a tip if you are using wired earphones — sometimes the microphone rubs against your clothes as you move. It’s a good idea to ask someone on the call how you sound to confirm you don’t have a constant “ruffling” sound when you talk.

#4 Better Eye Contact

Until engineers design computers with a camera at the center of the monitor, video conversations will continue with everyone looking slightly below their cameras.

Two quick hacks I’ve used to improve my eye contact with the camera is to hide my own self-view and to position the people towards the top of the screen (works best in a smaller conversation)

Putting my zoom app towards the top of my screen

Removing self view

No more distracting self!

[susbtack]

10 Lessons I’ve Learned Facilitating Groups For Online Courses

These tips apply for groups of 5–20 people. For larger groups, you probably want to put more emphasis on staying on time and coming up with a process for screening questions and involving guests in the session but a lot of these principles still apply.

#1 You are closer to an entertainer than professor

We often try to map our offline experience into the online world and this is a mistake, especially for online learning. 

The online learning facilitator is more entertainer than professor. I agree with David Perell, who is building a promising school helping people learn to write, share and create online:

The line between learning and entertainment will blur. Learning demands emotion and energy. The best professors will be inspiring, entertaining, and personality-driven. They’ll establish emotional connections with students, at scale.

We need less professor who turns their back away from the crowd

and more street performer:

You are someone that cultivates curiosity, enabling people to be on the edge of their seat wondering “how does that happen?” and “what comes next?” rather than worrying about what you need to know for the test.

#2 Level up your energy level slightly beyond what is comfortable

As the facilitator, people are looking at you to set the tone for engagement and energy. While you don’t want to be screaming at the group, you do want to be 100% focused and bringing some energy to the call.

One practice I’ve found helpful in making me more aware of my energy level is to practice delivering a speech in front of a mirror and increasing my energy and volume well beyond what would be appropriate for a small audience. This helps desensitize you to energy increases that might be more acceptable, but useful when doing things like facilitating online Zoom sessions. 

Tip: Ask a member of the group before a session to observe your energy levels throughout the session and to provide feedback afterward on what you could do to improve.

#3 Outline a clear agenda & set expectations

At the beginning of each session, I give the group an outline of what they should expect and how long each session will take. 

It may not seem vital, but sticking to the times you propose (or asking the group for permission to be flexible on the time) is important for maintaining trust with the group.

Before the sessions, I write down the takeaway I want the students to have for each section. This is a simple intention and often the insights raised by the group are unexpected and even better than I could have designed.

Throughout the session, I take notes on the key points made in each session so I can help summarize towards the end of the session and use them in a recap e-mail I send afterward. 

I’ve found that 15–20 minutes is a good amount of time for a “block” right amount of time to introduce a section, have some space for discussion and then to wrap it up and move on to something else.

In addition to setting the agenda, is setting expectations and norms of the discussion. I typically offer the following guidelines:

• Aim to stick to a maximum of 2–3 minutes for individual reflections and expect to be cut off if we need to stay on time with the agenda
• If you have any concerns or issues, send them in a direct message
• If you have something simple to add, don’t be afraid to message it to the whole group

#4 If you use slides, use engaging images and big text

I typically use slides and share my screen, but shy away from using the densely packed slides with 10 point font that I saw all the time in my past as a consultant.

I’ve written quite deeply about persuasion & presentation principles, including details like font and background colors, but for video calls I keep it pretty simple. I stick to simple messages, large font, and images that tend to make people smile, inject playfulness or make people think.

#5 Assign lectures, readings, reflections to do before the call

Don’t use a virtual session to deliver a lecture. If you have a lecture you want to deliver, record it ahead of time and having people review it before the session. 

This is the cadence I use for my online courses:

Before the session:

• Watch & review lectures (typically 30–90 minutes of video content)
• Read any pre-reading
• Complete mini-exercises (if applicable)
• Consider 2–3 reflection questions prior to the call

During the session:

• Group working session on the exercises & assignments
• Create space for shared reflections & takeaways from the readings & lectures

For optimal engagement, you want to have as many people as possible who are doing the pre-reading. If you are running a free or open event, the percentage of people who are “prepared” will be low, but think about ways to identify the people who can contribute most to the conversation.

One other option for Zoom calls is to co-watch something together. Zoom works quite well for sharing full screen videos, especially on Youtube. When you click share you have the option at the bottom to optimize it for full-screen video.

I try to limit clips and other media to 90 seconds or less. If you have something longer, ask them to watch it before the session.

#6 Show progress throughout the call

As I progress through the call I use the agenda slide and highlight where we are in terms of time and section of the overall call:

#7 Manage the conversation

Managing the overall flow of the conversation is more art than science and takes a while to get used to. The larger the group, the stricter you want to be in the time you give people to speak.

A couple things that work:

• Speaking time suggestions: Give people a guideline length to think about their contributions (“keep your comments to 2-3 minutes, if possible)
• Set expectations: If you tell people you will cut people off at the beginning of the call, it can be less harsh when you do it later.
• Cold Calling: Everyone hated cold calling in school, but it works. Even if you only cold call once or twice, it will give people the incentive to pay attention. Use the first cold call of each session on someone you know who is prepared and ready to contribute.
  Remember: Don’t go out of your way trying to embarrass people who are not paying attention and give them the right to “pass.”
• Sending A Message To The Group: Give the audience a heads up that you’ll be moving to the next section of the call (“in five minutes we will move to breakout rooms”)

Managing group calls on video is often a trade-off between giving people space to share and staying on track with the outlined agenda. If you feel something emerging also be ready to acknowledge that and pivot the focus of the conversation.

Another thing I like to do at the end of calls if people have not spoken is to say something like “hey, __________, I noticed you haven’t shared, do you have anything to add? feel free to pass of course.”

#8 Facilitate 1-on-1 interactions between the group during and outside of the call

If you are facilitating a session you may take for granted that you have an individual relationship with each of the participants. However if you really want to increase the engagement level for the whole group you need to facilitate 1-on-1 interactions between the group. 

When running online courses, the sessions always get better the more sessions we have because the participants get to know each other. 

While people may connect naturally outside of the call, one powerful tool is Zoom’s “breakout rooms” feature which I think will begin to take off as more people know about it.

This is a great way to enable 1-on-1 conversations and can also be used for smaller breakout discussions that don’t make sense in a large 10+ person group. They typically work best when you have a prompt question for people to answer and discuss.

#9 Get your hands dirty & use a virtual whiteboard

I use Zoom’s tools to collaborate with the group and have found a lot of success using a “virtual whiteboard” approach. I create simple frameworks which can be used to fill in responses from the group and use Zoom’s annotate options which are available when you are sharing your screen:

In my consulting skills course and consulting work, I use screen sharing while I actively make changes to the PowerPoint or material we are working on, which helps people feel engaged in the process. Often I’ll also give up control to the participants so they can share their own solutions or lead some of the problem solving.

#10 Recap at the end & follow-up

At the end of the call I always try to summarize what I heard on the call, spend 2–3 minutes to share the next steps and to leave space for questions, comments and open discussion. 

I often block off my calendar and make sure that I don’t have anything after the virtual calls. Often people want to hang out a bit longer or want to connect in a smaller group. I try to keep the virtual room open for those connections to happen.

Finally, I copy the meeting comments and summarize the contents of the call in a follow-up email within one day. I often include things like book recommendations and/or contact information if it is relevant.

It Is Still Early For The Future of Learning So Don’t Be Afraid To Step Up and Teach

I’m excited for the future of learning. 

As hundreds of thousands of students (and possibly more) across the world are shifting from in-classroom to virtual learning, there will undoubtedly be many innovations and experiments that go well beyond what I’ve offered here. 

While a lot of the technology exists for people to teach their friends or broader audiences, most people do not take advantage of such opportunities.

We assume we need a credential before we can do something.

You don’t need to open a University, you just need to find one person that’s curious about what you want to teach and share. I started teaching strategy consulting skills to my colleagues while I was still working and then to students at my alma mater. I taught hundreds of people before it evolved into something people were telling me to charge for.

In my Reinvent course, there is an “action challenge.” This is a one-week challenge where you try to take action on engaging with the world through the web. Some people take the opportunity to launch a podcast or start a website or blog. Others take the opportunity to teach.

One of my students of a past cohort wanted to learn more about cooking so he decided that he would host a “cooking show” on Faecbook Live in seven days. Because of the pressure he put on himself, he panicked and spent the next six days actually learning the recipes and secrets from his grandmother.

You can also think about just engaging with people 1-on-1. A good friend wanted to explore coaching and put up a post on facebook saying they were going to host complimentary coaching sessions with the intent of it being a “learning internship” to figure out what she wanted to do next. That learning internship grew into her main focus and business that has helped to sustain her life.

Don’t put pressure on yourself to be perfect. I’m still learning a lot with everything I do online, but what keeps me going is the people I meet and the connections that emerge.

Since people have been told to work at home because of the pandemic, I’ve seen many people throwing up a zoom link and inviting people to join them to discuss meditation, a book, a virtual happy hour or even just to hang out.

Whether you like it or not a lot of our future is going online. The quicker you are willing to start sharing what you’re excited about and giving people a space to come join, the faster you will find the like minded weirdos that will help give meaning to your life.

The guide and tips I’ve offered are in no way complete, but I hope they inspire people to take the chance to teach & share what brings them alive.

See you online!

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Virtual Spaces: How To Teach & Engage With Virtual Communities appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.