In the last lesson I outlined the high-level steps that’ll bridge the gap between a successful beta launch and your first full launch.
In this one we’ll look at the first of those steps: deciding what changes you’ll make before relaunching your course to a wider audience.
How to Strike the Right Balance between All and Nothing
When compiling your list of changes, you’re aiming to strike a balance between two extremes.
Make too many changes to your course and you’ll significantly delay your next launch and put yourself on the path to diminishing returns.
Make too few changes to your course and you’ll miss out on the benefits of running a beta course in the first place.
(After all, it’s unlikely that you built the perfect course on your first try!)
So how do you work out which changes you should make and which you should resist?
Well that’s exactly what we’re going to look at in this lesson, step by step.
Step 1: Review Your Beta Experience
Start by mentally reviewing the experience of running your beta. You’re looking to capture the insights that come most readily to mind.
Ask yourself:
- What seemed to work well?
- What seemed to work less well?
- What did you enjoy?
- What was frustrating?
- What else did you find surprising or interesting about the process?
Make a few notes and remember to look at the experience across the three main pillars: content, coaching and community.
Step 2: Refamiliarise Yourself With Your Course
Next, go back and refamiliarise yourself with your course content. After all, the creation of your early modules may be a distant memory!
Giving yourself a refresher will help you in a couple of different ways:
- It will trigger further memories about what worked well, less well, etc. – make sure to note these down.
- It will help you put your student feedback, which we’ll review in the next step, into the appropriate context.
And don’t confine yourself to your course content. Refresh your memory of what happened with your coaching and community pillars too.
This could mean going back to review a few group calls or transcripts, and revisiting old threads in your student community (if you provided one).
Step 3: Review The Student Feedback
Next, review the comments you received via your student feedback forms.
You’re looking for common themes – places where multiple people got confused or struggled in some way.
Tip: I find it works best to review the feedback one module at a time instead of student by student.
Notice where the feedback aligns with your own perceptions of how things went and give more weight to issues raised by several students.
Step 4: Zoom Out and Review The Big Picture
For the next step, mentally “zoom out” to review the bigger picture of your course.
Given the insights you gained from your own reflections and students’ feedback, consider whether the course is on track to fulfil your original mission and deliver the promise you’re making to your students.
In particular, ask:
- Did enough students make progress towards their desired destination?
- Is the process followed by your course sufficient to get the result?
- Do you need to shift your mission or the promise?
Note: It can be tough to answer these questions since they could lead to major changes to your course. However, it’s better to identify these now than push ahead with a flawed strategy.
Step 5: Review Your Curriculum and Identify Possible Changes
Now, go back through your curriculum with a fine-tooth comb and identify specific areas you might make changes based on your recent insights.
At this stage you’re not committing yourself to anything, just identifying possible improvements in the light of what you’ve learned.
For each module ask:
- What lessons are inadequate, redundant or completely missing?
- What assignments are too hard, unclear or superfluous?
- What additional resources could be created (and which ones should be updated or removed)?
Make a note of each possible update or addition.
Question: Will You Upgrade Your Production Quality?
Reviewing your existing content in detail is a natural opportunity to revisit the question of production quality.
Remember, the quality bar for your beta content was effectively: “just good enough to convey the vital information”. But for a full launch, offered at a higher price, you may feel you need to raise the bar a little higher.
The most pragmatic approach is only fixing content that is conspicuously below par.
For instance, it’s not uncommon for lesson videos that appear early in your course to be poorer quality than later ones. After all, you were still getting used to the production process at that point.
So you could decide to fix a few lessons dragging the overall quality down.
At the other end of the scale you could decide to upgrade all of your lessons: better slide templates, better audio and video, slicker editing, and so on.
However, try to resist that temptation unless you have a good reason – it could represent a large amount of work!
Step 6: Decide What You Will And Won’t Get Done
The penultimate step is looking at all of the possible changes you’ve identified and categorising them according to their importance.
I recommend a simple priority system: Must do, Should do, or Could do.
- Must do – these are changes that you are 100% committed to making before you relaunch your course because they will have a significant impact on its effectiveness and/or “salability”
- Should do – these are changes you feel you should make during the lifetime of the course but are not strictly essential for this relaunch
- Could do – these are changes you could make but are certainly not essential and may never get done (but you want to capture the ideas)
When capturing the changes, you can keep fairly high-level, e.g., “say more about topic X in lesson Y” or “add a new resource for lesson Z”.
When categorising possible changes consider both the impact of the change (how much it improves your course) and the effort required to implement it.
Step 7: Consider Any “Non-Content” Changes You’ll Make
The final step is considering any changes that go beyond your course content.
For instance:
- Will you change the course platform?
- Will you change the course price?
- Will you change the level of coaching provided?
- Will you change the level of community offered?
- Will you change the length of the programme?
Note: Typically, when moving from a beta to a full launch you’ll aim to increase the price and decrease the amount of coaching.
Some of these changes are cosmetic (e.g. changing the price) whereas others will require extra work that needs to be factored into your timetable.
Ready to Ring the Changes?
Okay, that’s everything to consider when deciding what changes you’ll make to your course before relaunching it.
If it seems like a lot of work just remember that you are ultimately in charge of the scope of the updates.
You can always run another beta style launch which includes only the most important fixes.
Or you could pick just one area to focus on for your next launch, such as moving to a better course platform.
Either way, it’s valuable progress on your course mission.
See you in the next lesson!