Forty Courses, and the Order They Arrived In

By the end, that business had more than forty courses, a membership with tiers, consulting, and a conference people flew to.

I am starting there because it is the part everybody pictures, and because the picture is useless. Nobody builds that. What you build is one thing, then another thing, in an order — and the order is the entire subject, because every single one of those products has a point before which it does not work.

Here is roughly how it actually went, and what would have broken if I had moved anything forward.

Year one: one course and the content

For a long stretch there was one course. Not four. One, plus a lot of free material, published constantly.

This feels like under-building and it is not. A second product at this stage does not add revenue; it splits your attention away from the only activity that matters at the start, which is getting enough people to know you exist that the first course has anyone to sell to.

The failure mode if you skip ahead: you end up with three half-marketed products and an audience too small to support any of them. I have watched this happen more than once. It always looks like productivity.

The first addition is another course, about a quarter later

Not a membership. Not coaching. Another course.

The reason is arithmetic. The people who bought your first course are the cheapest buyers you will ever have — they are already convinced, already on your list, already know whether you are any good. A second course is the only product that converts them without spending anything new to find somebody.

Pace it at roughly one new course a quarter and after two or three years you have a dozen. That is not slow. That is what a catalogue is: a decision repeated, not a plan executed.

Too early looks like: a second course launched before anybody has finished the first, aimed at a different audience, and marketed from scratch. You have not extended a business. You have started a second one.

Then levels, which is what makes packages possible

Once there are a few courses, arrange them rather than accumulating them.

A foundation course covering the core of the problem. An intermediate or advanced one that only makes sense to somebody who has the foundation. Eventually an expert-level product that assumes both.

That arrangement does something a flat catalogue cannot: it lets you bundle. Three related courses sold together at a real price is the first meaningful jump in what an average customer is worth, and it requires no new customers at all.

Too early looks like: an advanced course when the foundational one has not been taken by enough people to produce buyers for it. Advanced products have small addressable populations by definition, and the population is drawn from the students of the earlier course.

Coaching can come whenever, and it stays small

This one breaks the chronology, so it is worth naming.

Consulting is close to free to add — a page describing it and an invoice. It can go up at almost any point, and in the first few months it is genuinely useful, because it brings in money you can put into advertising while nothing else is working.

But it does not belong in the sequence proper, because it never scales. Every hour delivered is an hour worked. It is a service you offer, not a rung you climb.

Too early is not the risk here. Too much is. If consulting becomes the business, you have constructed a job with an unusually good hourly rate.

Membership comes late, and this is the one people get wrong

The membership arrives when there is something to be a member of.

A recurring product has to answer a hard question every single month: why is this person still paying? A back catalogue helps answer it. Ongoing content helps. Other members help most of all. At the start you have none of those, so the only thing sustaining the subscription is goodwill, and goodwill has a short half-life against a monthly charge.

Too early looks like: a membership launched alongside a first course, sold to forty people, followed by a slow visible bleed of cancellations that reads to you as a verdict on the whole business. It is not. It is a verdict on the timing.

Events last, because they need a community that already exists

The conference was near the end, and it could not have been anywhere else.

People do not travel to meet an instructor. They travel to be in a room with each other, which requires that they already know each other exists, which requires everything above to have happened first.

Too early looks like: a small room, a large deposit, and an experience that damages the brand it was meant to celebrate.

The rule underneath all of it

Every step above is the same test, so you can stop memorising the order and just apply it.

Can the audience you already have pay for this?

If yes, build it — the second course, the advanced course, the package, the membership once there is a catalogue. Each of those is a way of getting more value from people who already know you, which is the cheapest growth available to anyone.

If it needs a new audience to work, it is not an addition to your business. It is a second business wearing the first one's branding, and you will have to fund the marketing twice.

That is the whole sequence. It looks like patience from the outside. From the inside it is just refusing to build things that have to find their own customers.