You did the hard part. Eight sessions recorded, one of them twice because a lawnmower started up outside. The workbook laid out and printed once to check it looked right. A short introduction filmed on the third attempt.
Then you put it up, and the day it went live was quiet, and so was every day after it.
Two things before any of the rest, because they'll save you the reading if they apply.
This page is about the first ten students, not the first thousand, and it assumes somebody has already sat in a room with you. If nobody has yet, none of what follows works, and better to know that here than four screens down.
The second is that our own proof is thin. Justine Lette runs Hypnosis New Zealand, and she was paying over $100 a month for a platform she used a fraction of before she moved to us. There are 3,670 students on the platform. No meditation teacher is on the record yet saying any of this worked for her, and we are not going to invent one.
Nobody was ever told about it
Here is what did not happen on the day you pressed publish. No stranger arrived. Nobody was going to. A page going live is not an announcement, it's a door being unlocked in a building nobody knows the address of.
What you did instead was wait, and waiting felt reasonable, because everything you have read about selling a course online is written as though an audience is the first thing and the course is the second. Build a list of a thousand. Run a webinar. Post every day for six months. Warm up cold traffic.
None of that is wrong. It's written for somebody whose whole business is selling things online, and it assumes a starting position you don't have. You teach in a hall with a heavy door and a temperamental urn. You've got eleven people on a Tuesday and about two hundred phone numbers going back six years.
The gap between that and a thousand-person list feels like the whole problem. It isn't. Nobody needs a thousand people to sell a first course to ten.
Advertising is the other thing you'll be pointed at, and there's nothing shabby about it. It costs money the course hasn't earned yet, and it sends people who have never heard your voice to a page that has to do all the convincing alone. Ads are what you reach for once you already know the thing sells. They're a way to buy more of something that works, not a way to find out whether it works at all.
The third answer, and the one that sounds easiest, is to put the course somewhere with passing trade and let the browsing sell it. So here's ours, said early rather than in the small print. We have a public catalogue and people do look at it. It's small. Nobody is going to stumble across your meditation course in there this month, and we are not going to dress it up as an audience waiting for you. Every one of your first ten students will arrive because of something you did. If a busy marketplace is the thing you're shopping for, buy a different platform.
Ask the eleven people who already come on a Tuesday
So here is the thing that works, and it's the one nearly everybody skips.
The ten people who buy this course have almost always met you already. They've sat in your class. They came to a workshop once. They asked about the Tuesday group two years ago and never turned up.
So start there, and be direct. At the end of a class, out loud, tell them what you've made and who it's for. One sentence, said the same way you'd tell them about a change of venue. "I've put the eight-week thing together so you can do it at home, it's ready, come and ask me if you want it." Then stand by the door. Half the teachers reading this have never once said that sentence in a room. It is the cheapest thing on this page and it beats everything else on it.
While we're in that hall: every one of them has the same urn. Brown, industrial, twenty-five minutes to boil, with a laminated sign taped to the side in somebody's handwriting asking you not to move it while it's on. That has nothing to do with any of this. I think about it every time somebody says the word "funnel".
The list you already have and don't think of as a list
It's the register from the eight-week course you ran in person, and the people who came to a workshop in a village hall two winters ago, and the names in your phone with a note beside them, and the replies to the message you sent when you moved night. None of it looks like a mailing list, so you've never counted it as one. It's warmer than anything an advert could buy you, because everybody on it already knows what your voice sounds like, and a stranger doesn't. You can paste that list in, or upload it as a spreadsheet, and everybody on it ends up with a login without you adding them one at a time.
One rule that isn't negotiable, and it's ours as much as yours: only email people who asked to hear from you. Somebody who came to your class and gave you their address is fine. A list you bought is not.
Give the first three copies away
A course nobody has been through is still a draft.
Pick three people from your class who'll tell you the truth. Give them the whole thing, free, and ask for one thing back: where did you stop. Not what did you think. Where did you stop.
You'll get an answer you weren't expecting. It's usually week two, and it's usually because a lesson ran twenty minutes when six would have done. Fix that, and the next three get a better course than your two buyers did.
Then, when one of them says something kind and specific, ask whether you can use the sentence. That's your first piece of real proof.
What you send them when they finally ask
Right now the answer is probably a message with a payment link, then a second message with the video folder, then a third three days later because they never got the second. Every one of those is a place for it to stall.
Build a sales page with your own words and a Buy button that works for somebody who has never logged in anywhere, and the answer to "how do I get it" becomes one link you can send from the car park.
If you want the Tuesday group to have it cheaper, make a coupon code and say it out loud at the end of class. Same course, and a reason to move this week rather than next month.
Where this won't get you anywhere
Three situations where you should close the tab.
You have nobody yet. No class, no clients, nobody who has ever sat with you. Software will not fix that. Teach a free session somewhere with a noticeboard and come back when twelve people know your name.
You want a marketing suite. There's no ad tracking, no funnel builder, no landing page split tests. If those words describe how you work, the bigger platforms are built for it and they're the right answer.
You won't say the sentence. Every route on this page ends with you telling a room what you've made. If saying that out loud is worse than the course not selling, nothing here changes anything, and it's better to know that about yourself than to spend an evening finding out.
$47, and what that covers
$47 a month. One price, nothing to work out.
That covers unlimited courses and products, up to 1,000 active students, hosted video with a terabyte of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder, the AI assistant with 1,500 messages a month, unlimited communities and chat. The sales page, the coupons, the member import and the email broadcasts sit inside that rather than above it. Extra video bandwidth is $10 per terabyte if you ever get near it, and one eight-session course won't.
When somebody buys, the money goes through your own Stripe account and arrives with you. We take none of it. The only deduction is Stripe's own 2.9% plus 30 cents.
There's a 30-day money-back guarantee, and no tier above this one holding back the part you need.
Start with next week's class
There's a 30-day free trial and it doesn't ask for a card. Nothing happens by itself at the end of it.
Don't move everything in. Put the course you already made in as it is, add the eleven people from Tuesday, and say the sentence at the end of next week's class.
That's one evening of work, and it'll tell you more than another three months of the page sitting there.