Founder InstructorHelp (offers resources, tools and techniques for teaching online), Founder SucceedPM (making PMP preparation a lot easier). Ask me anything about eLearning, LMS, Course Development, Project Management, and preparing for PMP.
When it comes to building online courses everyone is an expert. That is a curse for someone looking for professional advice on how to design courses, build content, host the courseware, and market them. Having dealt with these aspects across various geographies, target audience and industries I offer help that is backed by lessons learnt from tons of mistakes I made.
I am a seasoned Project manager with experience of building complex technology products. I can offer guidance on lean project management practices.
Lastly, I offer advice on preparing for PMP, an exam considered difficult by many experienced project managers.
I have been involved in building and implementing systems - both SaaS based products, custom services. I have seen that it pays to smoothen the process of on-boarding by offering controlled and curated access to potential customers. Seed the environment with contextual data and help the visitors get the aha moment early on. Simple examples - if it is an LMS (Learning Management System) that you are offering, load a course with some videos, quizzes etc and let the user try it out both as a teacher and as a student and show the interactions involved. This strategy is more likely to help the potential customers understand the features and also makes the experience memorable.
It beats me that you want to stick with Podcasts - not that it is wrong - but why not expand into other media? Could be because of my background, but why not take up teaching? Get onto free to use Google Hangouts to run webcasts instead of your podcasts if that works for you. No need of big investments, huge reach on YouTube for your recorded sessions drive more users to signup for your Live webinars, that you could charge for. You could even increase your consulting revenue owing to the success of your recorded webinars.
There are many other ways to monetize your recorded sessions, so don't look at funding as your roadblock.
My advice is two fold.
One - go and buy a copy of Traction - http://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer/dp/1591848369/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1455378892&sr=8-2&keywords=traction
The book lists 19 channels to help promote your book and goes in depth offering great examples.
Two - my own piece of advise, consider this a distilled version of what Traction says :)
1. Start writing on Medium - offer pieces from your book and get people to "taste" your book. 2. Start a free course and talk about the same things you have written about in your book - you could scale this to paid courses if you get going and are interested in such revenues.
These courses could be in two form - 1. Recorded videos and tools (could be checklists, templates, or anything else that really helps someone) put together into an eLearning course. You could deploy this course on Udemy and watch people jump on it. 2. Live webinars where you engage with your audience - this even helps in refining your book, if you may.
I think you are thinking on the right lines. However, as someone who managed tech teams working on products I can tell you it is extremely hard to get these right. You would want to come up with something that you are going to stick to no matter deadlines, sales and marketing pressures, special requests from customers.
Do not get confused between Agile/Scrum best practices with managing people. I have seen teams struggle with estimation and that really leaves the appraiser in a state of confusion on how to judge performance.
Sit down with you team, state your goals - improved customer happiness, reliability and innovation are good enough - and come up with a few metrics, put them in the system for a month or so, review and improve. Do not write this in stone, because each team is different and so is each company.
All the best for a successful product backed by a happy team!
Why only entrepreneurs? Why not let all professionals seek help in return to paid advise? Same is the case with PHDs. Why not go after all those who have an expertise in something? That brings me to the question, how are you going to be too different from Clarity itself? Do you have money to back you up?
I'm sorry to sound so critical but do think hard about what value you are genuinely offering before getting too firm with your idea. Nothing wrong in throwing open a website to test out your idea, but let it do just that - test your idea, nothing more.
Think about adding an academic angle to the whole thing by letting experts offer answers to burning questions out there and throw open these stock answers in the form of videos. Stringed together answers on a subject, and let people pay for something that is specific after they have liked the stock answer.
Srinivas was great. He gave very actionable and focused advice. Thanks a lot :-)
Srinivas, is a fantastic man! His recommendations were on point. He knew right away exactly what I was talking about and generous in sharing his tips. If you are building a video course or do business in online education, definitely contact Srinivas for advice.
