New Technology Platform TEACHABLE Makes Creating Online Courses Crazy-Easy

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All right, welcome back to bacon wrap Business. This is Brad once again and thank you for tuning in today. I have, I'm welcoming back a guest from a previous episode about a year ago named Angkor Nagpal. Did I pronounce your name right, bud?

Yes, sir.

Ankor. Cool. I'm sure you get anchor and all this other stuff, right, so full spectrum.

But you got it right.

Exactly. So Ankara was on the episode called if ClickBank and Amazon had sex, they would be this, which by the way got a lot of listeners because I think I did a pretty good job with that title. That being said. So to give you a little bit of background, guys, Encore is the founder of a site and a platform called Teachable which allows you to really easily create and sell online courses. And if this sounds basic to you based upon your experience level, you're going to want to tune in because this is really all about the platform and the technology on how to do this. And what he has created is something amazing. Now if you've listened to the old episode, it used to be called fedora or use fedora.com that has been now rebranded teachable.com, which Dude, I think that is an amazing URL.

Thank you. It only cost us half our money now.

God, I bet. No, that definitely wasn't like a hundred dollar domain.

It was, he was definitely in the.

20K range but you know, hey, something like that, really good top level URL. So I'm going to assume that a lot of people don't really know the.

Haven'T heard the previous episode. So we'll kind of go into this right now. But a lot of folks are probably familiar with the concept of selling information products and online courses and all the various ways that you can cobble things together and do them yourself, whether it's setting up your own WordPress site, selling through your own merchant, using ClickBank and really cobbling together a lot of different systems and hoping they integrate smoothly together. I want you to tell me what Teachable is and then I want to dive in for the audience and my benefits on some stuff that is really working because you get the benefit of Seeing a lot behind the scenes, what's working and what's not cool. So take it away. Tell us about Teachable.

Sure. So Teachable was first started out of my frustration. There were certain aspects I loved about being on a platform like Udemy and certain things I hated. So Udemy was great at the time just because the whole idea of video based courses made sense. The idea of making education easy, accessible, the fact that it was all integrated in one platform as opposed to on a WordPress site with 12 different plugins, that was great on Udemy. What was missing on Udemy is the fact that you had no ownership of your audience. So I kind of wanted to bring what a lot of marketers were doing on membership sites, along with the simplicity for platform like Udemy and combine them and build something really powerful. That was the original vision. Since then, I mean, you know, our product has gotten stronger and we now do things that were not possible otherwise.

Yeah.

The biggest feedback we've gotten from people is, I'm so happy you have this. Because, look, I'm a content creator. I want to teach, I want to write, I want to spend my time developing content. I don't want to spend my time dealing with plugins, which is the beneficial. A lot of people, different existence, stitch together all these different platforms, all these different softwares just to do what you want. Our goal has been we want teachers to focus on teaching and we take care of the technology.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's fantastic because I've been the guy in the past who's cobbled together all the various platforms. And what's cool is if people are familiar with Udemy or Coursera and Lynda and all these other kind of marketplaces, which is where you go there and then you go shopping. What's cool about Teachable? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's self hosted, meaning it's your own little school. You create your own little course so people don't get distracted. Like, if I go to Udemy right now and I want to take a course on how to design a webpage or whatever it is, I could be distracted by some other dude's course really easily. So with Teachable, it kind of removes that and you get a captive audience.

Yep. It's also your brand. Right. Like a lot of times what we tell people is if you're selling courses online, you want to have something that looks good and you want to have something that's about your brand and not, you know, the marketplace's brand on teachable you know, you are the focus of it. It's entirely your brand.

Yeah, I love it. And you know, for my listeners who are, if you've created these courses in the past or if you are thinking about it, my biggest advice to some of my coaching or students and consulting clients is don't overthink this and keep it as simple as possible. First, work on quality content and spend the rest of your time working on getting people to the site, not on tweaking and managing and dealing with a million other issues.

Yeah.

Especially as anyone that's launched an information product, digital product, knows normally launch week is the most stressful time of your life. And for a lot of, a lot of times it's for reasons outside your control. It's like, holy shit, there's people on my site, there's people trying to check out and nothing's working right. That's what we're trying to get rid of. We're trying to at least be like, look, there's enough other things you need to worry about in your online information entrepreneur business. Technology should not be one of them.

Exactly. And this is great. And this is also awesome. If you're an e commerce company who wants to create courses on, you know, let's just say you're selling kitchen tools or kitchen gadgets. You want to create a little, you know, self hosted course on cooking or whatever, you can use things like this. It integrates into your site. Okay. So people can go to teachable.com and check out all the cool features and all the other, you know, techno gadgets and stuff you can do. But I want to talk about kind of behind the scenes because as a person who gets to see the who's doing the best on your platform and all of this other stuff, give you.

The top 10 list right now.

Dude, go for it. Like I want the bacon.

Yeah, no, honestly, it's, it's, it's been, what's been amazing is one, just to see different people be successful every month. It's not like we've had this one kind of breakaway winner like last year. Through most of the first year around, most of 2014, our sales were dominated by a company called Bitfountain. Two guys, I guess they're now 27 that were teaching iPhone programming that in their very first year on our platform made over a million dollars in sales. And that was great in a lot of ways. And John and Elliot are amazing. We did a lot of stuff with them together. But from our perspective it was a little, not frustrating. But we were too Reliant on one customer. There was a point, and we do only 200,000 monthly. They are half of it. And the good thing is now we're at a point where we're completely diversified. We're starting to see so many different, you know, success stories across different verticals. One of the biggest fears people have is, hey, my course is not about making money online. My course is not about programming, marketing, or design. Can I still be successful? And honestly, that's what I love seeing. That's what I love seeing. What I love seeing is, you know, obviously there's a lot of people in the making money online vertical doing well, but what I love seeing is, like, the watercolor artists make $10,000 a month.

Oh, it's awesome. That's truly taking your passion and making money out of it.

Yep. And that's what's been the most rewarding part to see is just not the people really making necessarily like six figures a month, but the people just with a wide array of, you know, experiences and the people to whom, you know, who are making $500 a month. But that's meaningful. That's made a meaningful difference in the quality of their lives.

Absolutely, Absolutely. So let's get back into that top 10. Let's hear what's working, what's making people money.

So, again, one of the first things we found out is the vertical doesn't really matter. We can't draw any meaningful conclusion from what topic people are teaching.

Right.

What we have started noticing is, in terms of what's not working is we had a lot of people who used to be on Udemy and come to the platform and are like, okay, you know, this course looks good. I'm going to sell this course for, like, it sells for $29 on Udemy, so I'll sell it for, like, $19 here. Those. We've realized that that does not work. Like most of our successful instructors, their average course price point is. Starts at about 99 and is between 99 and 299. Like, that's kind of the sweet spot in terms of at least the data showing the most successful. Yes, we do have someone. You know, we do have people selling a lot of $9 courses, but that's just a much harder way to build a successful business.

I agree.

The other thing we've noticed that's been really interesting is at the end of the day, the teachers that are consistently doing the best are those with good quality content. I mean, I know it sounds obvious, but it's been kind of good to See that? Reinforced.

Yeah. Okay.

Are there any. What do I want to say?

Let me ask you this more about the platform. So is the. When I go to purchase a product, how much control do I have over the sales process? Like the design of the sales process, is it standardized? Is it kind of flexible in the way I want to show?

Every single page on our platform is completely customizable. If you wanted to dig into the HTML, you could rewrite it from scratch, just on the checkout page. Specifically, we've limited some of the functionality. You can still change the styling, but you know, from a security perspective, we don't want people to steal credit cards or something. Yeah, added a little bit of measure, but outside of that, everything is customizable. You control your pricing from a feature set perspective, we've come a long way. I mean, you can now have multiple pricing tiers per course. You can have bundled courses, you can have affiliates work automatically authors work automatically selling 100 different currencies, month payment plans. Like you have complete customization on how you want to charge people. Which again is, you know, a big part of what we're trying to do is help teachers actually make a living teaching online versus just, you know, just giving them a platform to teach.

Yeah, I love that. So your, what do you, what is your favorite feature? Kind of the favorite non obvious feature of what you guys are able to help people do.

So this is funny because I, I was told this by a customer yesterday live on a webinar, as to why she loved us and I never even used it for that. But she runs a lot of joint venture webinars and we have a feature that allows you to make someone an author in your school and set up automatic revenue sharing with them. And she now runs all her JV promotions through that. And that's not something that was designed for. It was designed for if you're building a marketplace and want to bring in different teachers. So it's not even the way it was designed. But her killer feature is the fact that she can easily, when she's running a JV webinar, set up a purchase URL in teachable, set up her partner to be on that course. And we do the math. The other partner has live stats. The other partner also receives an email every time a sale has been made. Complete accountability. And that's not even the way we designed the features.

Okay, that's really cool. So let me kind of recap that as I understood it. I go to, I've got my own school, bacon wrap business school of Being badass. And I go to.

John Smith over here who's got a great course on Facebook marketing and I said, hey, I want to promote your stuff, so let's do a webinar together and we talk about your stuff and when they buy it, they're actually going to buy it on my site and we're just going to upload your content, we're going to create the course over here and, and then in essence you'll still get paid out, it'll be the same amount, et cetera. And you can even somewhat manage because they'll be kind of a co author.

Right.

They'll be able to go in there and manage.

You can set the percentage that John receives on every sale. That'll only apply to his course.

Nice. So you know what else is kind of cool about that, especially in the non make money Internet marketing style niches, is you can go after some people who may have a big following, whether it's social media or an expertise or they've got a list but they don't really know how to build out a site or a back end or whatever. You just tell them, yeah, we're going to put you right on here. And obviously I'll promote it to my list as well. You'll promote it to yours.

And that doesn't preclude them from taking the content elsewhere and creating it on their own. In a way you're just kind of licensing it from them.

Yep, absolutely. And what's, and the interesting thing we've seen is obviously very biased opinion, but right now if you have any kind of online audience, might it be, you know, purely on YouTube? It could be purely social media. If you have any group of people online that look up to you, like maybe the readers in your blog. I have not found a more efficient way to monetize that audience than by creating an online course. Selling affiliate products. Not even close. Creating physical products. Not even close. Creating a good high quality course on a dollar per person in your list and stuff. I mean it's amazing. Like we've seen, we recently saw someone have a $150,000 launch to an email list of three and a half thousand people.

Really?

Yeah.

And what market was that in? You don't have to tell me the.

Product or anything but authors catering to self. Published authors.

Nice.

Was that Chandler Bolt by chance?

I'm not naming names.

Okay. Chandler was.

We're not allowed to.

Chandler was a former guest of Min and a friend and he's got, he owns self publishing school. So I didn't know if that was him, if he was migrated over to you guys. But dude, that's awesome. I really like that feature and I like having that ability. Do you guys offer at the moment one click upsells on your program or not?

The two, the two big features that are kind of coming next that we do not do right now is drip content and one click upsells.

Okay.

And overall, I don't know. Overall, we're pretty different from a lot of companies because we're built and structured like a software company and not like an Internet marketer selling software.

Sure.

And sometimes what that means is we delay features because we need to do it right. Like we right now have 5,000 people using the platform. We do something half baked, it's going to cost us so much time and support that it's not worth it. And the other thing is we're also building the company not to make money today, this month, next year. We're building the company for the long haul. Right. Like we raised $2 million in financing, we're going to raise some more money. We have 16 people working here full time every single day making this better. That also means we're more patient about certain things. It also means we actually have a very, very long term view here of wanting to make something amazing that almost outlives us rather than having just making a lot of money this year or next year.

Right, right. That is really cool. So are there any other best practices you've kind of seen that are working, whether it's getting people to the sites or what you do once they're on there?

Yeah, absolutely. So few best practices. In no specific order, one is your course should contain some kind of an outcome for a student. If your course does not have a defined outcome. I don't think it's a course thing. It's a collection of videos. The first thing you need to do is have an outcome for your student. The second thing that's again, a lot of this might seem obvious, but bear with me, is you need to have an email list which is again, ties back to why building a business on Udemy might not be the smartest decision. Because you're not building a list.

Bingo.

And you know, just building an audience that cares deeply about you is. There's no substitute for that. There can't be. There's no way to hack around that. So that's really important. The third thing that is another kind of misconception that holds people back is a lot of people are worried about.

Like they almost focus less on the transformation and the outcome for the student and focus more on like, hey, how many hours of video should I have? Or hey, what niches are profitable right now? It's more like, dude, think about your student. Like, how can you change, make meaningful change in your student's life in one very defined, specific way? And if you do that, it does not matter if your video quality is.

Not perfect results trump everything else.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, like, we're not big on certifications. We're not big on giving your students, you know, something that says they completed a course. We're all about produce results for your students. Because that's what I believe education should be.

Yeah, I agree completely. And you know, that's interesting. That's one of kind of a big thing that I'm passionate about is just the education system in general and how broken it is at all levels from, you know, from grade school to college, etc. And how it is really. I know a lot of big, you know, a lot of big thinkers and entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley guys, too, are agreeing that it's probably the next big, huge industry to be disrupted highly by exactly the stuff that you're doing. That's why I think teachable is so cool. I mean, really, the big picture, I imagine you might have too, is that being on the forefront of redefining education. Right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we're already, you know, I think we're already doing that in a lot of ways, except our angle is to redefine education, coming at it from the teacher's perspective. Pretty much every company we're competing with is coming at it from the student's perspective. And that's also a very vital way of doing it. We want it. We want to create more teachers. We want everyone to teach. So we're coming at it from the teacher side.

Exactly. Well, and when you have the people who want to teach able to teach, you know, as opposed to disinterested folks who, you know, nothing against the public school and private school teachers out there right now, but, you know, in general, after a while, a lot of them get burned out and they're just not as effective. But you get somebody.

I would. I would be too, if you kind of look at the compensation structure where, you know, you're. You're getting the same salary with a small raise year on year, as opposed to the guys from bitfountain who, yeah, they made a million dollars their first year. But guess what? When the Apple Store, sorry, when whatever dev tool Apple uses, they made a small change to their interface. So certain videos looked different even though functionally nothing changed. They spent 30 hours re recording every single video because that's the commitment they have to their students. Right. They've built a business, they want to be the best at their business. So they spent 30 hours at a stretch rerecording stuff so it would be perfect for their students. No one in the public school system will do that because the incentives are not aligned. It doesn't make like, you know, no teacher is going to, no public school teacher will ever do that. But when you have someone who's building a business, wants to be best in class and they will do that.

Yeah. And then at the end of the day, you're going to get a heck of a lot of better students and more engaged students because you've got better teachers doing this. And yeah, dude, I think it's an awesome equalizer. Everybody complains about teachers don't make any money. Well, not if you're doing it the traditional way. But if you're really passionate about teaching, here's a method. Get out there. I mean, honestly, if I was a teacher on something at a, you know, at a, I don't know, high school teacher, I'd jump on this right away, say I'm looking for extra money, I'm gonna see if I can do this.

Then pitch your students.

The other thing that's kind of cool about this kind of stuff is it lets more people teach. Like John and Elliot from bitfountain for instance. They would have never been hired to be iPhone programming teachers because they sucked at it for a long time. They were self taught, they had no formal credentials. But because they sucked at it because like it's something they learned gradually over many years, they were better teachers for it. Right. You have to go by virtue of not being as qualified, you're more empathetic teacher. A lot of times you're better off learning from someone that went through the same path. And that does not happen in the traditional education.

Somebody who's actually done it.

And that's where we've done it in a relatable, in a relatable way. And that's, that's the other thing I find really cool is you can learn from people like you, which doesn't normally happen.

Exactly. I think that's awesome, man. You've got a really cool platform here. I can't wait to jump back into teachable and log in and play around with it. I very well may.

So much has changed.

Yeah, I very well may create a bacon Wrap Business Academy if people are interested. Actually, if you're interested in your.

In seeing what I've potentially got up my sleeve and you want to kind of vote with your emails, shoot me an email to ask bradaconrappedbusiness.com and say, yes, Brad, create some stuff. Here's what we want to learn. Tell me the topics, because what kind.

Of courses are you going to teach, Brad?

I don't know yet. That's why I'm asking them. Let's find out what they want to know. I'm kind of a jack of all trades, in a good way, but sometimes in a bad way because it's hard for me to say this is my specific expertise.

I tend to be more. I tend to excel more on the creative side of things. So when it comes to copy and.

Conversion, you've done some coaching, right?

What's that?

I said you've been doing some coaching, right?

Yeah.

And what do you think is the biggest transformation you've brought to any specific student?

I think clarity and simplification of the steps they need to do to kind of get their. Either their business started, but a lot of times I work with people who've already got a business, but how to kind of simplify the process and find, you know, find the big pieces of leverage in their business that they're able to go after kind of that 80, you know, getting the 80, 20 effect, spending 20% of your time or.

And who are these people? Are they generally individual independent entrepreneurs?

Usually independent entrepreneurs or people with small teams of 5 to 10 people? Majority of my, majority of my, you know, my biggest clients are about 1 to $10 million in revenue, and those are the ones I'm able to have the most impact on. But I've worked with multiple people who are, you know, either just starting off or, you know, doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year.

But that's your answer right there, right? What's your first course? If you, if you are consulting, if you're coaching, there's probably some people that want to use your services that can't afford to because they might not be in the $10 million range, but in the $100,000 to $1 million range for them. You can sell a course as a productized consulting. Effectively.

Exactly. Yeah.

That's it. There's your course, man.

I love it. Yeah, I love it. I like the fact of having co authors do this too, because I could see bringing other people in to co author it. You give me a lot of ideas, brother.

This whole course thing is Too much work. I'll just hustle. Bring. Bring people to do it. I'll handle the selling.

Hey, dude, I just mentioned I like leverage points. 80, 20. Right? That's how I work. So, man, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you coming back on the show to tell us about Teachable. And you guys can get that. Go see the site@teachable.com and take a look. I mean, people can log, they can create. What's the price?

Started for free. On the free plan. We take a percentage and you can pay us to not take a percentage.

Yeah, you only get paid once they're starting to sell. Right.

On the free plan.

On the free plan.

Right. Some people want advanced features to jump up, but yes, that's awesome. Totally set up stuff for free.

Well, I wish you luck. I look forward to jumping in there and.

Play around with it even more for all my listeners. If you want more stuff from encore, go to teachable.com and keep listening to the show. Subscribe on itunes if you're not a subscriber and leave us a review. And if you're not on the newsletter, you may want to jump on that. You can just. Just email me at askbradakenrightbusiness.com or go over to the main website and click the button to sign up for the newsletter I will be holding. I've got an upcoming webinar that I'll be doing very soon. Just really about how to position and position and promote and persuade other people who are sometimes way outside your social circle. And if you want to kind of hear about this, I think you'll really like it. But that's only going out to the folks on my newsletter list. Baconritebusiness.com Encore Brother, I appreciate you. Anything else you want to add?

Nope. Man, this has been a lot of fun. It just feels nice to hear teachable.com instead of use fedora.com totally. So getting past that, but awesome. It's been a lot of fun and I look forward to chatting soon. We'll keep doing this every year.

Absolutely. Same name. Hopefully next time. Yep.

Yes, sir.

All right. Thanks a lot, Ankara.