Do not create an online course before reading this

1. Mobile Experience will be the Key Differentiator

Developing countries like India are massive markets for online education, and the majority of the users will have access to mobiles but not necessarily laptops or desktops. So design your content with a mobile-first approach because the consumption will be on the phones.

2. The Perfection Syndrome

Don't waste several months perfecting your course. Once you have a draft version, please ship it, be embarrassed and get quick feedback.  If there were problems with your course creating process, the best way to find out is to publish free samples of your content on various mediums. Udemy, FreeCodeCamp, YouTube, Social Media Channels, etc

3. Embrace Marketplaces

You can't stop people learning from leading marketplaces. I'm not too fond of platforms like Udemy, but you cannot overlook them.  You cannot outcompete them as a small business owner. Though your content might be a lot better, their voices are more influential. So admit the reality and distribute your content on multiple channels, including these marketplaces. This will help to capture your audience.

4. Marketing First Approach

Let's assume you launch a course after many months of efforts, then if nobody buys it for a while, your content will become irrelevant, and you have to rebuild the content all again. So it would be best if you started building products around your content: A 30-Minute Workshop, ebooks, Cheatsheets, Masterclasses, etc. Once you create a couple of quick products, start distributing them on various channels. For instance, you can begin selling ebooks and webinars for FREE, which will help you build an email list. Then slowly push a couple of low tickets (1 USD) products and so on. This exercise will help you in finding channels to acquire customers, validate market demand and collect feedback. If you invest 'X' unit of time into the Product development, put 5X into Marketing.

5. Build Trust with Social Proof

People will not buy your course if they don't have the trust whether your content will help. The worst part is that even though your competitors' content is awful, it will be selling because they have a feedback loop of positive reviews enough to have 100 for every positive review I have. So think about how to engineer feedback.

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