Harms: One of the core elements of that was how do we transition through the BATON model? 

How do we transition people from the tribe into an offer but a low-cost entry offer? 

That’s the phraseology we’re using here, an entry-level offer and our recommended method for an expert funnel putting together a short course in order for you to sell via a low fee at £10 or $10, £20, $20 that kind of price point in order to allow an entry point for not only information, but discovery about your knowledge and starting to build a high level of trust and authority as somebody progresses through your expert funnel is as we’re describing it here.

Kyle: This is a follow-on from the expert funnel masterclass we did, we’re going to be talking about the product, the first paid product that we really recommend you create and we’re going to be talking about why this particular product and then going through it in detail what we’re going to be doing. 

The first product that we’re going to be talking about is creating an online course or masterclass/online workshop. 

The basic idea is we’re going to be packaging up your knowledge and deliver it as your first product using this masterclass format. 

That’s going to the focus of this guide. 

One caveat is if you haven’t created online courses before and you’re already selling online courses this guide won’t probably be that helpful. 

What we’re going to be covering in this guide is going to be primarily for people who are setting up their first online funnel, selling their expertise but that they don’t really know where to start or maybe they’ve got an e-book or some other bits and pieces out there but they don’t have a full course. 

They are the people we’re going to be talking about. 

So if you have put together any masterclasses, online workshop over a series of weeks or a course this is not going to be useful. 

This is about the foundational first course that people should be creating. 

If you’ve never done anything like this before you’re in the right place.

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Harms: The idea of this is creating your first pilot course and your first entry-level course rather than creating a complete perfect product that will come later in the future. 

For example, you may say I am a regular producer of course content, so I agree with the fact that it won’t be completely applicable unless you decide to move into a new idea or a new problem that you want to solve, then you may want to use the techniques.

If your desire is to build a flagship course of the go to course customers rave about that will happen but later down the line, but really the scope of this guide really is number one what is your basic course idea? 

What’s the problem that you want to solve? 

Number two is validating the idea we’re going to share with you two techniques in which you can validate that idea and work out if it is an idea that somebody would want to purchase. 

That’s really the key here, and number three is an MVP version of that course, so a minimum viable product version of the course. 

Why create a course?

Harms:The first question to ask Kyle or what’s a nice place to start is the question why are we creating a course? 

I’m an expert, this is not what I do, I don’t teach online. I don’t sell educational products, I do something completely different. I am a business coach, consultant PT, yoga teacher. 

So why create a course?

Kyle: The term course automatically makes us think about academic courses, it makes us think about lessons and learning mathematics or something highly structured and highly non-experienced base, not expertise based, but more academic. 

If you’re hearing the word course, I’m not a teacher, what’s this got to do with me? 

Remember the context of this product, this course, this mastermind whatever you want to call it within the context of an expert funnel.

Harms: Masterclass is a really good way to position it because what we are doing is we’re not necessarily going to be providing a step-by-step guide. 

Nobody is going to enter our semester, or the first month where we talk about the history of whatever that topic is, it is a masterclass. 

It’s you downloading your information and knowledge into a digestible form which somebody can enjoy. 

Let me give you some examples of what exists out there online, a great example of this is people who are already established as experts who have gone onto public speaking. 

They’ve hosted workshops and what they’ve also done is feature their courses, which are actually referred to as masterclasses on bigger platforms, such as something like masterclass.com.

Think of it as an expert sharing their expert knowledge via a masterclass knowing that at some point in the future there’s going to be a sale or a customer interested, or your audience is going to start to develop.

Kyle: Whatever your business niche is, whether you have an existing business, or you want to set one up. 

You are an expert in something, now this could be yoga. 

This could be accountancy. It doesn’t matter. You are an expert in your particular field and we are monetising that so at the moment in your business, you might sell services, that’s fine. 

You sell your time an hour consultation costs X amount of money absolutely fine. 

What the expert funnel is a sales funnel is an online business which takes your knowledge, your skills, your expertise, and we package it up into products. 

Instead of you selling your time we’re moving you over to selling products based on your expertise. The traditional way to do this, 10, 20, 30 years ago is to write a book and that’s considered, okay that person has written a book they must know what they’re talking about. 

Then you start getting on TV shows and being asked for interviews in magazines and newspapers etcetera that used to be the way to prove your expertise. 

What we’re talking about now is producing a masterclass, producing a course as a much quicker, much more effective, and efficient way of encapsulating your knowledge and skills and your expertise into product form.

Harms: Think of the course as a speedy, instant way which doesn’t require as much work as creating a book. 

That’s great, but if you dive into some of those authors, those are years and years and years of work to produce one of those incredible books. 

However, do you have years and years and years to achieve a sale? 

That’s the real topic here. 

Where are we sitting in what we spoke about in regards to your value ladder, you can call this your expert funnel. 

What we didn’t want to do is just say at the end of last week’s guide go ahead and create a short course, that is not what we wanted to do. We wanted to say we know what we want to create a short course, perfect. 

Now let’s spend a week discussing in detail what that short course is and what that entry-level product is that you can offer your market because once we nail that, then we can move people over to the core product and a premium product later down the line. 

It could be public speaking or something similar. 

I mentioned the phrase there Kyle short course and what’s your thoughts on a short course because I don’t get worried and think, you want me to charge £10 and it’s going to take me 10 hours to create a course and put it together. So what do we mean when we say short course?

Kyle: Imagine someone has dropped out of school and they want to become what you are. 

They want to learn what it is you do, you as yourself, you know what those expertise is, you know the steps you took. 

Imagine just taking them for a coffee or beer and explain to them this is what I did, these are the steps I took. This is the advice I would give you. 

You can encapsulate most of that into an hour, maybe a couple of hours if you get really chatty. 

We’re talking about that kind of level we’re not talking about guiding them and hand holding them through every single step. Maybe that’s something you might do as a mentor, a coach later but right now we’re talking about giving them the download of okay, when I was in your position. 

These are things I did to get to where I am now. So a short course could be depending on how it is structured, it could be as short as an hour, with you just downloading what it is you know to your audience.

Harms: Some other tips to think about is the outcome for the end user for your short course is quite short, it means they can get this entry-level information quite quickly and because what we don’t want to do is present them with 10 hours’ worth of content, 20 hours’ worth of content which will overwhelm them massively. 

A short course, which means it’s easily consumable and what we mean by that is it’s like in segments. 

But in simple terms it is easily consumable and not overwhelming for them. But even within that one hour, bearing in mind where they are in their expert knowledge it’s going to be providing massive value. 

Don’t feel like actually if I’m only producing a one-hour course am I short changing somebody? 

Actually no, because based on what they currently know that hour introduction is like wow, that’s a lot of value I’ve taken away from that hour or whatever it ends up being for your short course. So don’t think of it from that element. 

The other advantage to doing a short course is it’s a very quick way to build that trust because what we don’t want to do is build trust of a 10-hour course and fingers crossed somebody completes a 10-hour course. 

Instead, we put something together for an hour somebody can actually get through that in an evening or one afternoon, on their daily commutes and within that hour the trust starts to develop quite quickly. 

Those are some key points and areas for why we think short course and also the advantages of a short course and doing it that way. 

So what’s two ways once we’ve got this short course, what are the two mechanisms in which somebody can use it?

Kyle: It depends on your particular business niche. 

It depends on how difficult it is to build up an audience and how difficult it is to make a sale. This is going to depend entirely on your market and entirely on your product offering. 

Once you have this course, this masterclass, this asset. 

This is something you can use in many different ways. The two broad categories are going to be, you can give it away for free in order to build up an audience. You can use that to generate traffic and people will be attracted to you because you’re giving away this massive value, or you can monetise it and as there are a bunch of different ways to do that. 

You can immediately sell it on marketplaces like Udemy or you can host it on your own website, your own membership site and charge people access on that site. 

We’re going to be going into different details on how you would monetise it. 

We are recommending this course should be monetised for experts. 

We talked about giving away free content, giving away free education, giving away free value. We’re going to be using this course as the first paid step. We’re taking people from free, okay I am interested, to right, I’m willing to open my wallet and pay you $10, $20, $30, $50. 

We’re moving into that paid section of the funnel.

Idea validation

Harms: Let’s now talk about the next question, which is the basic idea of the course and what is your course actually going to be about that. So that’s a big question.

This goes back to the BATON model and framework.

Kyle: It goes back to business. 

What problem is it that your business solves? 

All businesses provide some kind of solution. Even businesses based around luxury brands that’s still about identification, it’s still about having a luxury brand which a lot of us might think is not useful, it’s not something that needs to be, it’s not a necessity, but for some people it is. 

All businesses have some form of problem that they solve. And knowing exactly what the problem is and being able to define what that problem is and how you then solve that problem, is the core to a successful business. 

We are going to be using that problem statement as the core of our course as well. 

Each section becomes very simple because you’ve already defined or this is what my business does, so when we have the question what is my course going to be about? 

It’s going to be the same thing. If your business is about helping people raise funding your course is going to be about helping people to raise funding very simple.

Harms: Throughout your expert funnel try to stay focused on solving the same problem. 

Now one of the challenges people face is I’m an expert and I want to talk into that space, I want to answer that question, which means if you think your customer comes in here they are like, what does this person represent? 

What are they an expert in? 

What are they an authority in? 

Do I trust them in this topic? 

Because for a customer it can also be confusing that one person can be a genuine expert of all of these places. Because we don’t want to confuse interests with generally what problem your business can solve, interests versus experts.

Let’s use the example of a documentary just to give you an idea of what that looks like at the end so if you are helping somebody educate them on that topic. Your premium product at the end here could be they hire you and your company to produce a documentary for them. 

Why would they do that? 

Because they’ve just seen this entry-level course answering the same problem. 

What we know is your premium product that helps people on a shoestring budget and it means you can produce your masterpiece on an iPhone, which means they’re going to have a saving but rather than do it all themselves, they’re going to hire you and your team and bring you guys into doing it. 

That’s an example of what it may look like later down the line for you. 

What’s a good formula, a very simple formula for them to think about when creating/formalising this for themselves?

Kyle: Very simple we need two sentences, two statements. 

One will be a problem statement. So how do I get rid of my credit card debt? 

That would be a problem statement. 

That’s the first one we just need, the second one is a solution statement so how to get rid of your credit card debt. You don’t need anything more complex than this and I think people tend to overthink it. 

We can match a problem and a solution statement very simply, but you just need to know what that problem statement is to be able to work out what the solution statement is. 

And that solution statement will basically become the title of your course. 

So how do I get rid of my credit card debt and then the solution will be how to get rid of your credit card debt in seven steps for example and that becomes the course. 

The main point you’d get across that we need to get across now is we need to know what it is that our audience, our tribe and our customers are struggling with and what it is we can help them with and that is going to be the course.

Harms: I think the complication comes from; I think for me in the past it’s been I don’t think I’m going to reach enough people with that title. Or I want to answer more questions for people. 

So for me personally the challenge has been in the past where no that’s too small, that’s not going to get me enough customers, that’s not going to hit enough people and we often have clients who are experts in lots of areas come to us and say, that’s too small of a topic, but what about this? 

I want to help them with this? 

I think that’s often where the complication comes.

Kyle: The way the Internet works, though, is that people are searching for very specific problems. 

Let’s say I have a problem with my foot, so I might be looking for a podiatrist I’m not going to be interested in all of the services a podiatrist can provide. 

I’ve just got a big toe that hurts so I’m interested in that. I don’t care about my ankle instability etcetera so experts tend to want to drop everything within their domain within their sphere, I as the potential customer I have one problem. 

I do not care about the other bits and pieces, that’s the same for any niche. When people search online they’re searching for that particular problem. 

They don’t care about your entire solution; they don’t care about your entire expertise. They care about the bit that is right in front of them right now, that allows them access to you and then from there, they might start to be interested in what else you can offer. 

But you need to get them in on something very precise upfront.

I want you to go away right now and start to think okay I could do a couple of hours on teaching people how to do this or I know a lot of people have this problem, so maybe I could do this course. 

What we do want to start doing though is yes, you’re going to have some fantastic ideas hopefully you have a few and you might be jotting them down. 

What we do is start to validate those ideas because a lot of this process is going to be about using our existing audience, using our tribe members as a resource to produce a product that’s going to be the most possible value to them, so it’s in their benefits as they’re going to get something fantastic. 

It’s in your benefit because it means your product is going to be better as a result. 

There is a philosophy, theory of business called lean, which is all about how we develop our product, we develop our services in as much public view as possible. Because market research and everything is fine, but we don’t really know the work until we hit the market until we take our product to market. 

People might just lie when we’ve got them in focus groups, when you say would you buy this? 

They say yeah, just because they want to please you, but as soon you say okay it’s $500, they’re like no. 

What we’re trying to do following this lean methodology of creating as quickly as possible and getting it out onto the market. 

With this in mind we can actually work with our current audience and tribe to work out what our core should be about. And this is a really nice external way to get some validation about whether this idea is worth pursuing or not. 

Maybe you’ve written down five different things I can teach, I could easily give a masterclass about this, we’re going to start talking to your community to work out which of these is worth pursuing and which you should either do later or they’re not important right now.

With tribe/audience

Harms: There are two methods that we are all going to share with you. And again, there are lots of different ways to validate your idea online but we are going to share with you two. 

So the first method to help validate your idea is actually have a conversation with number one your audience. 

If you remember we already started to build this at the start of our expert funnel, so have a conversation with the audience and also your tribe and if you remember based on this expert funnel, your audience will typically live out in the wide world Web. 

They follow you, they may watch your content, but then the tribe will be living within a community/group. 

We cut through the noise there and said a Facebook group is solid and also Slack group will be solid, depending on whatever your expert funnel is. 

The first way to consider this is actually just to ask the question, ask the tribe the question and say I’m thinking about putting together a course on how to do X, and which will be the problem. 

The problem that they have and you should start to gauge this anyway based on the conversation you’re having with your tribe, following the structure we spoke about. 

I’m thinking about putting together a course on how to do this, could you please let me know what you think. Just ask the question.

But people don’t do it. 

Imagine you have a group of 500 people or whatever it is, whatever form your tribe is in, this is such an amazing resource and so few people do this when they’re producing a product. 

Instead, they just produce the product in secret almost and then release it and hope that a group of people are going to like it. 

Just ask, and say I am putting together a course on this, what do you think?

 Anything I should include?

These are really great questions because what you think will prompt one thought and anything you like me to cover will prompt another thought, that’s the way to structure this asking of your tribe. 

The more you can help them out in this early stage, the entry stage, the better. 

So ask is one way, what’s another way?

Kyle: There are different variations and asking them different methods mythically, so one which is particularly useful in Facebook groups if you have your tribe there is to set up a poll. 

So the same thing you sketch down five ideas, different masterclasses you can give. You put them in a poll and say which one of these are you most interested in. 

Again, very simple, but it will give you a quantitative, a real idea of what it is your community is actually interested in.

Harms: Another way to do it is have an open question, almost like an open forum. 

You phrase it to say I’m looking for an open discussion here and I would like everybody’s thoughts and feedback on I’m putting on a workshop, a course, a masterclass within your field and what would you like to learn about? 

Rather than speaking more specifically to people we’re now opening it up for a community discussion and then allowing that to feed off each other.

Kyle: The first one is asking about a specific course. I want to do a course on this. What do you think? Yay or nay. 

Second is I’m going to put a poll up and get some responses based on a few selections. 

The third one is an open question. 

I want to do a workshop. What do you want to learn about? Totally open. 

All three have the added benefit of you getting the cooperation of your tribe, you’re getting the cooperation of your audience. 

So yes, they help you come up with ideas, and they’re helping you to validate the idea for a future product, but more than that they’re being co-opted into the creative process. 

Let’s imagine you did have an open question and over a week 10, 20 people vocally express opinions and you create a course that has elements of what they have suggested. Let’s say, Sarah has suggested you should do something about putting together the legal paperwork for raising funds. 

This is in the funder raiser example. 

You say okay I’m going to do a little under a section on the legal paperwork. When it comes to selling that course later, when it comes to filling that course with the first students you can , Sarah by the way I’ve done especially a module on legal paperwork.

Do you think Sarah will sign up for that course? 

Yes. 

She’s not only part of the community. 

She is now part of that creative process of creating that course which is going to make it a lot easier to get in your first customers. You’re getting feedback on your ideas, you’re actually getting their ideas, what things they would like to see, they can take over the creative process for you. 

But more than that because they’re part of the process of creating the course because they’ve felt listened to and valued they are much more likely to purchase a course when you do go live, when you do start selling.

Competitive research

Harms: That’s very much speaking to the tribe and audience. 

Now another way to validate your idea is by having a look at what the competition is doing? 

This is research around what’s out there. 

What’s the competition doing? 

Now competition is simply put, it is a great thing so please don’t be disheartened when you go through the suggestions that we are going to give you that goodness there’s like 50 courses on what I thought I was going to speak about. 

Because this may be the first time you’re researching and exploring the stuff online, and you may be surprised by how much information or how many people are teaching your specific expert subject. 

Don’t be disheartened, and say nobody is going to buy my course, that’s not the idea here. The idea is to say, look at it from an abundance mentality, but also from a data driven approach that, this must mean that a market exists. 

If this many intelligent experts are serving this market with their course and their entry cost product and by the way, not everybody will have this setup. 

They may have simply just produced an entry level course simply to make cash off that entry level course that may be their technique. 

Whereas, although we like to assume that everybody’s got this mail, it’s actually not the case. I’ve seen when we do research somebody has a course and when I further research into their product nothing else exists. 

So I think keep an open mind with this and very much look at the marketplace as an idea that a market exists. What we don’t want is the opposite, which is we do research and we see nothing online for what we want to talk about. 

That should start to raise alarm bells because there’s not enough proof in a market that there are enough customers to actually purchase this particular course or this product, or this idea.

Kyle: This seems bizarre but competition is great, soon as you see other people making and selling courses or other products connected to the problem you’re trying to solve, that’s good. 

That means there is less market risk and market risk is probably the biggest problem when you’re starting a business online or starting a business anywhere. 

If the market does not exist you will not be able to succeed unless you have a huge amount of money and you can make the market, but don’t try and do that. 

It’s just a very hard way to get into business and instead we’re replacing the market risk with competitive risk. The market exists. Fantastic good to go. And there are competitors in that market, fine. 

We can deal with that. 

We cannot deal with market risk; we can deal with competitive risk. 

That’s a key point here.

Udemy, Lynda

Kyle: For example people selling on Udemy that’s their entire business. 

They just create courses. 

They’re not doing the rest of the stuff about building an audience. 

They are not building the tribe. They don’t have any other business concerns connected. 

Remember why we’re doing this, why we are building an expert funnel is to drive our actual business, yes we’re going to make money from core sales, but that’s not the be all and end all of this process. 

However, for a lot of the people you will see that’s all they are doing. We started by saying we are not trying to become educators. 

We are using educational products to increase our business. The people that you’ll see when you are looking at the competitive market a lot of them will be educators. 

That is their primary role. 

They’re not selling consulting; they’re not selling services; they are not selling retainers off the backend. 

So that’s even better as we are seeing a market for this stuff, and the people in this market may not even be competitors. This is fantastic, so very quickly where’d you find these competitors? Google is the best place to start, but more specifically we can look for video courses. The big site you want to check is Udemy. It is probably the largest online marketplace for courses, go and see what’s in there. 

Check out the categories, look for what category you would be in and see what courses are, have a look for how many reviews they have. You can also see how many students are involved and look for star ratings. 

See which courses seem to be the most popular within your category and maybe that helps you. Maybe that gives your ideas that you can implement into your course as well. 

Another one is Lynda, which tends to be for more technical subjects. If you were teaching video editing, or photoshop Lynda would be a good want to look for. Also look for masterclass.com.

Other formats & here is a big tip and untapped method

Harms:  What Kyle has discussed there is an example of looking at current educational marketplaces where they sell courses to see if people are producing courses within your idea within the problem you’re wanting to solve.

If a lot of people are buying it means there is a market here, people are buying and there is enough money, enough interest to support one of the courses

We are asking you to validate the marketplace before you enter it, so another method in order to do this in order to assess the competition is actually quite a big tip. 

I would note this down because it is a bit of a loophole/untapped area which not many people are aware of and often Kyle spots these items.

Another way to do it is to have a look at somewhere like Amazon and start to look in their book categories, Kindle book categories and their traditional book categories. Have a look at what popular categories or popular books exist on one side but there’s no video course for those same problems and solutions that the book is talking about. 

What we’re saying is we’re identifying an area where there are books but there’s no video course on the same topic. 

Why is that so important? 

Because what we have here is a demand for a certain type of a book and idea and topic, but they haven’t tapped into the other way and other format people consume educational information, which is video and a video course. 

So what we are identifying here is a gap in the market which is completely untapped. 

That’s a really good tip now to get started. 

Another way to think about what we spoke about stage one is there’s no category here, let me just double check if there is generally no category here or there is a gap in the market. So you head over to the bookstore. 

Check the categories. Check for popular books and say genuinely there is a market here. I may have a first mover’s advantage if I enter this market with a video course that will show you a gap exists. 

If there is no book on that topic that you are intending on creating the course for then there is no gap so that’s another way to check as well.

Kyle: That will tend to be not always, but it will tend to be with more traditional markets. 

So if you are talking about online business, how to do photoshop etcetera that’s all done. Video courses like that exist. If you find a very busy Kindle or book category where there is a lot of stuff going on, there are authors, lots of reviews again, lots of stars, but there are no video versions so maybe there is a gap.

Sometimes people get really stuck here because they are looking for the perfect niche or the perfect market. 

This stuff is important and you need to have a look, but you need to not get stuck here and some people will build up big spreadsheets finding the best category but they get stuck. 

Marketing competitor research is really useful but it has to be a sense check to make sure you’re not going totally in the wrong direction with something that nobody wants. If you find an existence of a market, there’s going to be a way few to serve that market and just get on with creation and we see too many people here just get stuck because ultimately you do not know whether your product, your course or later your book or whatever it is you do not know if it’s going to be successful until you release it into that market. 

So all of market research in the world is not going to help you instead you need real verification, which means creating a basic version of the product in getting it out into the world if people buy it that’s verification, that’s validation and that’s the only validation that matters is when pull out their wallets and say okay, I will give you money for this. 

Anything else is just fiddling around with spreadsheets.

Harms: Allow the market to be the decider. 

If you ultimately let the market decide if there is a demand for your product once you’ve done a sense check. So, what the key message here is, is that the actual production, the actual momentum of building out your expert funnel here is important, not the whole process off I’ve mastered, I’ve found this pure gap in the market because you may end up selling to that gap and it is a work. 

Allow that market to dictate their success once you’ve had a sense doesn’t work and that’s the key here.

Some funnels could take two to three days, something more advanced where you end up with an e-book takes four to five days end-to-end.

Kyle: So while this stuff does sound like a lot of work, it doesn’t have to be. 

You can move at speed, producing and creating and get things out quickly. 

That’s actually what we recommend as if we were to spend six months writing that it wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. 

Plus, when you release something you just need to gauge the reaction and then you can adapt. You can add to it, you can create but the key thing is to get something out of the door so you can get that public reaction.

MVP version of the course

Kyle: MVP is a minimum viability product. 

It’s a concept that comes from the lean start-up lean methodology. There is a book by Eric Reis called The lean start-up. It is a basic idea of instead of developing a product or service or business in secret and then releasing it only to find out nobody cares. 

Instead, you work more openly, you show people early versions and we see this in software a lot. We have alpha testers. We have beta testers. 

We have early access and it takes quite a long time before an actual product is released. In videogames on the PC in particular, often a game will be an early access for years before it’s released as a finished product to the public and that’s accepted in software development. We do less of this in other markets, but we should learn from software development and use this idea of an MVP, a minimum viability product to gauge what it is that the market actually responds to. 

An MVP is the minimum that you can get away with really releasing out to the public. 

So, let’s use this e-book we just produced as an example, if I just published a Word document onto Amazon full of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and no formatting. That’s not good enough.

That’s not minimum viable. 

Minimum viability on Amazon, for example, needs to have a cover. It needs to be nicely formatted, it needs to have no spelling mistakes, the links in the document need to work. 

These are the basics, but it doesn’t need to be the final version of the product because nowadays we can republish, we can recreate, we can update. 

When we publish to Kindle, for example, we can update it if a spelling mistake is found, that can be updated in the file and then instantly that book has been corrected to everybody who has Kindle. 

Whereas if a spelling mistake got into a printed version of a book. 

That’s it, you have 1,000 copies of Harry Potter with a spelling mistake.

Harms:  Also the word viable is variable depending on what you are creating as well, and what that product is for. 

If one of your core products is a physical product slightly off a tangent, then it may have to meet certain health regulations that you can’t skimp out on. 

What would we define as a minimum viable product based on a traditional format within an expert final. 

Typically an expert would go ahead and create a book. 

What we would say is a better minimum viable product than a book that an expert can produce is a course that is fully recorded. 

Number one is a book, two is a course but it’s pre-recorded. 

What is our preferred method for minimum viable product? 

What’s the best version of the minimum viable product for your expert funnel? 

It’s a live course but then we take that live course and package it up into a book later down the line so that’s the key here, rather than do it the other way, which is a book then off the book, recorded course then off the recorded course we do live video series and Q&A’s, etcetera. 

Let’s work this way up the ladder.

Within the expert funnel we’ve extracted information from that book and presented it to you in a very simplistic way for you to immediately take action.

Kyle: The main thing here is using live video to produce the first version of our course allows us to do it fast, we can be doing this within the next few days. 

Whereas if we were to pre-record video there’s a lot of production, a lot of time editing. And if we want to write a book it’s going to take nearly six months and you have to find a publisher etcetera. 

We just want to go to market as quickly as possible. 

You could go to market today if you have an audience or a tribe and follow the steps we’re going to be covering. 

Because we get to market quicker we are able to verify the market exists at each step of the process and that; s going to save us just a lot of time and money and anguish. 

We’re not going to be in 12 months’ time sitting there with a hundred thousand copies of our book that nobody wants. 

We are instead going live, we’re going to verify people want this, we’re going to iterate, we’re going to change based on what we’re learning from our live audience and then use that to step up and build products from that point.

What we spoke about in this guide is you creating your first course and why we are selecting a course and why, we’re reframing it as a masterclass. 

We’re going to refer to it as a course

Harms: But think about it as a masterclass when presenting your expert knowledge. 

We also spoke about understanding how to identify your basic area. 

This whole idea of somebody has a problem and you are providing the how-to for that problem. Then once we’ve got that idea, let’s validate it.

 Let’s do a sense check, let’s find out what’s happening out there not going over analytical on it, but just a sense check. 

One is for the tribe, chat to our audience, ask them questions, number two is have a look at the competition. And then we spoke about in detail the idea of a minimum viable product, what we see as acceptable and the whole escalation ladder of creating a minimum viable product MVP and then improving it over time with the feedback.

One big to-do off the back of this guide is very simple is think about what problem your course is here to solve? 

What is somebody’s problem and what is your how-to you’re going to pick together for that one hour, hour and a half short course.

That’s the one key thing to do.

What you have learned so far:

• Why creating a course is one of the best ways to close sales online
• Identify what your course should cover
• Validate this idea so you ensure you purchases
• Create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version of your course

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