I found a huge problem.

There was way too much information crammed into the introductory lessons. Way more than a beginner could absorb. And I found it seven days before students would see it.

A week isn’t much time to fix that. I made some quick changes and put “restructure this from scratch” on next year’s agenda.

Cutting it that close isn’t ideal. But catching the problem at all, even late, only happened because I went back and reread the material with fresh eyes instead of assuming last year’s version was still right. That’s the part that’s supposed to happen, again and again, not just once when you first build the thing.

Why your first outline is a theory, not a fact

Any system you build, a course, a coaching process, a curriculum, starts as a theory.

It’s your best guess at what people need and how they’ll learn it. You should plan carefully, because planning forces you to spot your own assumptions. But you should also assume some of those assumptions are wrong.

The only way to find out which ones is to actually run the thing and watch what happens.

That means the courses that keep getting better beat the courses that stay the same, even if the stagnant one started out more polished. And getting better over time comes down to three habits I’ve built into how I create and run courses.

1. Build with “ease of change” in mind

2. Teach interactively before you build

3. Use the responsive feedback approach

Let’s go through each one.

1. Build with “ease of change” in mind

Years ago, we noticed something strange in one of our Lefkoe Institute courses.

Students were asking their clients way too many questions during the coaching process, overcomplicating a process that’s supposed to be simple. I went back through the lessons trying to find the cause.

What I found: There was a lesson covering all the different types of questions you could ask a client. At the time, I thought it was a great addition. Turns out it made students feel like they needed to ask every possible question.

I could have rewritten the lesson and have our founder, Morty, re-record it.

But reworking a video lesson meant, writing a new script, re-recording, editing the audio, creating new slides, syncing the audio and the slides and finally the easy part re-uploading it. So I cut the lesson out entirely instead, with an intention to make a replacement if needed.

The problem disappeared and we never needed to replace the lesson.

That’s the trade-off with locked formats. When change is expensive, you don’t make the change. You work around it, or you just don’t touch it.

Since then, we’ve moved most of our material out of video and into text, in Google Docs specifically, not PDFs. When I see a term tripping people up, or a section that should come before another, I fix it in seconds. No writing a whole new script, no re-recording, no editing, no re-exporting, no re-uploading.

If someone wants to see what changed, it’s sitting right there in the version history.

Has anyone missed the video? Out of hundreds of students, one or two have asked for it. So no, not really.

Making your lessons easy to edit is what keeps the gap between “I see a problem” and “I fixed the problem” small enough that you’ll actually close it.

2. Teach interactively before you build it

Before I ever built the SAT Essay Formula course, which taught students how to get a high score on the SAT Essay, I taught the ideas live to a room of real students.

My first version flopped.

I’d read through a stack of SAT prep books at Barnes & Noble, taking notes since I wasn’t about to buy them all. I pulled together five things that seemed to matter most for the essay, taught them to my class, then had students write a practice essay before and after the lesson.

The essays were basically identical. My teaching hadn’t changed anything.

So I went back to the essays themselves and looked for the actual problems. I found three. Some students had an unclear thesis. Some had examples that didn’t actually prove their thesis. And some had a decent example, but their logic and reasoning never connected it back to the point they were supposed to be proving.

Once I could see the problems, I taught the solutions, one skill at a time.

First, how to read the prompt and build a clear thesis from it. Then, how to pick examples that actually prove that thesis. Then, how to use logic and reasoning to make the connection between the example and the thesis unmistakable. We didn’t move to the next skill until they could do the one in front of them.

That’s when the essays actually improved.

I only wrote the SAT Essay Formula after I’d watched real students fail with my first approach and succeed with the second one. If I’d skipped the live teaching and just written down what I thought would work, I’d have shipped the version that didn’t work.

You can plan a course perfectly on paper and still be wrong about what actually helps someone learn it. Teaching live, even to a small group, tells you which parts of your plan were right and which were just a theory.

3. Use the responsive feedback approach

One student in a Lefkoe Method Training cohort pointed out several small things that weren’t working.

At one point he told me an assignment we assigned weekly felt tedious and he wasn’t sure it was accomplishing anything. I looked back at it and realized he was right. We didn’t need it. I pulled it from every lesson.

He noticed. His reaction was something like, “Wow, you actually did that.”

From then on, every time he flagged something, we fixed it. His internet wasn’t reliable enough to stream our videos well, so I made every lesson available two ways, one to stream and one to download.

We also run what we call random learning.

Mid-course, we’ll notice a gap that only shows up once people start practicing, something that isn’t in the main lessons but clearly needs addressing. So we write a short lesson and send it right when it’s needed, instead of cramming it into the original material where nobody would remember it anyway.

This works because you respond to feedback visibly, while the course is still running.

That’s what tells students their input actually does something. Once they see you act on it, they keep giving it to you. Stop responding, and they’ll stop telling you. So by the end of the course when we ask for comprehensive feedback, they give us pages of ideas we can use to improve the program.

But won’t people feel like I don’t know what I’m doing if I keep making changes?

I understand this concern.

It’s easy to believe that a person who really knows what they’re doing will make a plan and follow through, and everything they plan will turn out exactly as expected. But keep in mind that even the best teachers I’ve ever met are not able to anticipate every challenge the very first time they teach something.

When you see teaching expertise, you are often watching someone whose already put in work with previous courses as well as many hours behind the scenes you’ll never see. You are also seeing someone who has likely made many mistakes and learned from them.

It’s Week 1 into my latest course for the Lefkoe Institute and we’ve already fixed 3-4 things that weren’t working well. And yet, there’s no indication that students have lost faith in us. Quite the opposite.

What we did get are thank you’s for fixing issues so quickly.

Final thought

A course you can edit easily, teach live before you sell, and keep improving in front of your students stays “unfinished” on purpose. That’s what makes it get better.

That’s why I’m not worried about finding a huge problem in my own course a week before it started this year. I’ll rebuild it next year, and I’ll probably find something else worth fixing the year after that. The lesson from the coaching course, from the SAT essay class, and from the student who kept flagging small things, is the same one. Your first version is a theory. Keep testing it and keep improving it.

Your Next Step

If you’re building a course right now and want a structure that’s designed to be revised instead of locked in stone from day one, The Atomic Course Blueprint walks you through exactly that. Find out more here.

Still here? Merci beaucoup.

What’s one thing in your course you’ve been meaning to fix but haven’t gotten around to? Reply and let me know. I read every one.

My sister had let it run around the garage but I didn’t know. I was walking barefoot when I felt my foot landing on something white, warm and fuzzy. My rat.

And what happened to the poor creature?

I could only imagine having to tell my parents that I killed my special pet. Even if my sister shouldn’t have let it out without telling me. It would be my foot that ended it’s life.

As my arch felt fur, I had an immediate reaction. My knee shot straight up into my chest. Then I picked up my rat to check it out. Was it OK? Did I squish it? After a few minutes the verdict was in. My pet was unharmed.

It was only due to a literal knee-jerk response that my rat was saved.

Instincts keep you alive right now, no time to think. Knee up. Hand off the stove.

But a blunt email from a customer isn’t a threat, even if it feels like one. A quick reflex saved my rat. But an unthinking response can wreck your course.

So instead of reacting, we diagnose the issue. That’s why we’ll discuss three ways to respond to customer feedback on your course.

They are:

A. Make the obvious change

B. Change their mindset

C. Diagnose the deeper problem

Let’s begin.

A. Make the obvious change

This is the one time the reflex is actually the right move.

Summary notes, visuals, a live demonstration: whatever’s easy and obviously useful, just build it.

Some suggestions are just obviously good. If it’s easy to implement and it makes the course better, you make it. No mindset shift required, no deeper diagnosis needed. You just do the obvious thing.

I wish more of course-building was this simple. It’s not. Which is why the next two need something slower than a knee-jerk reaction.

B. Change their mindset

Sometimes the student has the wrong idea.

In our most recent course at the Lefkoe Institute, we got consistent feedback asking for more buddy assignments.

We’d previously reduced them on purpose, because in past cohorts, students couldn’t keep up when there was more than one buddy assignment a week. And here’s the kicker: the SAME students asking for more buddy work were also telling us how hard it was to keep up with the existing workload.

So what do we do? On one hand, we know more buddy work led to fewer students completing the course due to overwhelm. On the other hand, the students are asking because they feel they need it.

Taking some time helped me see what to do. Address the belief underneath the request.

Their belief “All the buddy practice should happen during the course.”

In the next iteration of the course, we’re teaching students WHY there’s a limited number of buddy assignments, but also making it easy for them to keep working with each other after the course ends. Same underlying want. Different, better way to meet it.

C. Diagnose the deeper problem

Sometimes customers are suggesting the wrong solution to a real problem.

In my latest course for the Lefkoe Institute, students asked us to organize every tip given by every instructor to every student. Sounds fair, right? Except in our last course there were nearly 21,000 messages. That’s an overwhelming amount of information. Sure, I could use AI to make it all searchable and accessible in about an afternoon.

But I also know that doing so would actively hurt them.

These students are learning to coach other people. And when you’re sitting across from a client, you can’t be rifling through notes or running a search — you have to be listening, then responding at a natural, human speed. That means knowing what to say intuitively, or at worst with a short pause to think. Most students get there by the end of the course.

A few still feel shaky on one or two specific skills.

What actually helps THAT problem is picking the one skill that feels shaky, building a plan to improve just that one, pulling only the material that supports it, and then, once it’s solid, moving to the next skill.

These students believed they needed ALL the information to succeed.

They hadn’t yet realized that the step-by-step approach that got them through the course is the same approach they need for the rest of their careers. Focused practice on one skill at a time. Information wasn’t going to get them to intuitive performance. Only practice was.

That’s a design fix. We hadn’t taught them how to keep learning after the course ends.

You have more than one option, every time feedback comes in

So next time a student complaint lands in your inbox, consider these three moves:

• A. Surface - If it’s an easy and obvious change. Make it.

• B. Mindset - If the request is reasonable, but granting it would hurt them. Teach them why, and solve the underlying want a better way.

• C. Design - If the feedback is a symptom, something in how you built the course needs to change.

Most people only ever check for A. The other two require you to sit with the feedback a little longer before you act on it.

My instant reaction saved my rat because there wasn’t time to think. There’s almost always time to think about a piece of course feedback. Use that time. Diagnose before you respond, and you’ll do right by your students far more often than a rapid response ever could.

If you’re building a course right now and want the structure sturdy enough to survive this kind of feedback before it ever reaches a student, that’s exactly what the Atomic Course Blueprint is built for — a focused process for building a small, tight course that doesn’t fall apart the first time someone pushes on it.

Got a piece of feedback that took you a while to figure out what to do with?

Hit reply and tell me about it, I read every one.

And somehow, months later, the course still doesn’t exist.

Here’s what I’ve learned after building courses myself and helping dozens of others do the same: validation isn’t what gets a course finished. A deadline is.

Why validation alone won’t save you

There’s a version of validation that’s useful. Surveying your list, putting up a waiting list page, getting a few people to say “yes, I’d pay for that” — these are smart moves. They reduce risk. They give you signal before you invest months of work into something nobody wants.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: most course creators don’t fail because they skipped validation. They fail because they validated, got a decent signal, and then... kept waiting.

Waiting for more certainty. Waiting for a better time. Waiting until the idea felt more fully formed.

The truth is, no amount of signal replaces the forcing function of a real deadline.

The 30-day experiment that proved this to me

When I built the Atomic Course Blueprint, I gave myself 30 days to finish it.

I was also writing daily build-in-public updates, posting every weekday about my progress. I was writing a weekly newsletter. And I was running a course at the same time.

By any reasonable measure, I did NOT have the bandwidth for this project.

But I had a deadline. And that changed everything.

I got it done in 30 days.

Then I did the same thing with my iPARA course — how to organize your digital life for action. Same approach. 30 days. Daily progress posts. Done.

Would I have finished either of them without the deadline? I’d like to think so. But honestly? Probably not. At least not that fast. And probably not at all.

Because without a deadline, other things creep in. Client work. Family. The inbox. The next shiny idea. A deadline doesn’t make you more talented — it just removes all the decision-making about whether today is the day you work on it. Today is the day. You committed.

The webinar I almost didn’t give

A mentor of mine kept asking me to put on a webinar for his audience. And every time he asked, I’d say yes, go sketch out some ideas... and then gradually let it drift away.

Then one day I just picked a date 30 days out and told him: “How about this date?”

He said yes.

The moment he said yes, I started working. Not sketching. Actually working.

And when that date arrived? It was the worst possible week for me to deliver a webinar. The worst. If I hadn’t already committed — if people weren’t already expecting it — I would have easily cancelled.

But because the deadline was real, and because other people were counting on me, I showed up and delivered it.

That’s the power of a commitment with a date attached to it.

What “setting a deadline” actually means

Setting a deadline isn’t just picking a date on your calendar and hoping for the best.

It means asking yourself a few hard questions:

How many minutes a day can I realistically work on this? And more importantly — when are those minutes going to happen? For me, it’s either early in the morning before the house wakes up, or at night. I have a wife. I have two daughters. The time has to come from somewhere.

What has to stop so this can start? A deadline only works if it changes your behavior. If you just stack the new project on top of everything else, the deadline becomes a wish.

What’s the smallest version of this that would actually be finished? One of the biggest mistakes I see is people scoping a project so large that a 30-day deadline is a joke from the start. If your course is going to take six months no matter what, you don’t have a deadline problem — you have a scope problem. Shrink it. Build the smallest version that delivers real value. You can expand it later.

But what if I’m not sure the idea will sell?

This is the objection I hear most often. And I get it.

Here’s how I think about it: validation and deadlines aren’t opposites. You can do a quick gut-check — put up a waiting list, send a survey, gauge the response — and then set a deadline for building the thing.

But at some point, you have to make a decision. And the longer you wait for certainty, the more time passes, the more momentum dies, and the more the project quietly gets shelved.

The real question isn’t “do I have enough signal?” It’s “can I afford it if this doesn’t work out exactly as planned?”

If the answer is yes — if the scope is manageable, if the time investment is reasonable, if a quiet launch wouldn’t break you — then set the deadline and build it.

Because there are upsides to finishing things that don’t show up in sales reports. Clarity. Momentum. Opportunities you couldn’t have predicted. I’ve seen people write books that didn’t sell well, and those books got them onto podcasts, which led to clients, which led to revenue they never expected. You don’t always know what finishing something will unlock.

The summary

Validation is a risk management tool, not a permission slip. Use it wisely — but don’t let it become a reason to delay indefinitely.

What actually gets courses finished is a real deadline with real accountability behind it.

Pick a date. Tell someone. Organize your hours around it. Then build.

Want to know exactly what to do each day until your course is finished?

The Atomic Course Blueprint is a 33-page guide that shows you how to create a small, high-value course without the usual overwhelm.

The premium version includes a 23-day step-by-step plan — so you can set a deadline and know exactly what to do each day to hit it. No guesswork. No blank-page paralysis.

Find out more here.

Still here?

Merci.

One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and tell me: do you have a course idea that’s been sitting in a Google Doc waiting for you? I read every reply, and your answer might inspire a future article.

I once tried to follow my own instructions and couldn’t get past step one.

I was putting together a storytelling workshop. I had written out the full procedure, every step in order. It felt completely solid. So I tried to follow it as if I were someone who had never seen the material before.

It failed.

Right at the first step. That’s when I understood: knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach it are two entirely different skills.

Today I’m walking you through three options for testing your course instruction before you release it, so your clients can actually follow what you built.

Let’s start with why this matters more than most course creators realize.

There’s a version of this that happens to programmers all the time.

They build the software, test it for bugs, then ship when it looks right to them.

Then the complaints come in. Users are confused. The interface doesn’t work how they expected. Things are broken in ways the programmer never anticipated.

The programmer hears those complaints and thinks, those are minor issues. People are overcomplicating it.

Then someone sits them down and makes them WATCH a real user try to use the software.

That’s when it clicks. What looked simple from the inside is completely opaque from the outside. Suddenly the programmer understands what actually needs to change.

Coaches and consultants do the same thing. They build a course, think it’s great, get low completion rates or zero success stories, and assume the buyers just didn’t do the work.

But a lot of the time? The problem isn’t motivation.

It’s the instruction.

Your First Set of Instructions Is a Theory

When you write your course content, you’re building a theory.

A theory of what it takes to guide someone who DOESN’T already know what you know through a process that feels completely natural to you.

That’s harder than it sounds.

Experts leave out steps they’ve stopped noticing. They assume context a beginner doesn’t have.

That’s what almost happened with my storytelling workshop. I knew the material cold. What I didn’t know was whether my instructions could guide someone who didn’t. Testing the instruction is what revealed that.

And testing it is the only thing that can.

If I had shipped that workshop without testing the instruction first, I would have been trying to figure out what was wrong live without the luxury of time to test and reflect.

That’s a terrible experience for everyone in the room.

Your content might be brilliant. But if the instruction is untested, you won’t know where the gaps are until your clients are already struggling through them.

Three Options for Testing Before You Release It to the World

Testing your instruction doesn’t have to be complicated.

Option 1: Test on yourself first.

Follow your own instructions. From the page. Exactly as written.

Step by step. Like someone seeing this material for the first time.

Where do you hesitate? Where do you find yourself skipping ahead because you already know what’s coming?

Every one of those moments is a gap. Fix it before anyone else has to find it for you.

If you can’t follow your own instructions without skipping steps, no one else can either.

Option 2: Test with one other person, and watch.

When I was preparing to teach at a new high school, I tested my methods of instruction on my sister. Walked her through exactly what I was planning to do with my classes.

My first days of school were so much better because of it.

Give them the material. Watch what happens. That’s it.

Where do they hesitate? Where do they ask a question you didn’t anticipate?

Those moments ARE your revision list.

One person is enough to find a TON of major gaps.

Option 3: Teach it live before you package it.

The first online course I ever made was called the SAT Essay Formula. Before I designed a single lesson, I had already spent months teaching kids how to write the SAT essay in live classes.

I made the teaching mistakes in person, figured out what actually worked, and watched students practice until I could see exactly where they got stuck.

By the time I wrote the book, my students said it felt like having my class in a book. That’s because it basically was: months of live teaching, refined into something someone could actually follow on their own.

If you have the opportunity to teach your material live first, take it. Even once. Even to a small group. Aim for 30 to 50 percent of the time being PRACTICE, not lecture. Watch what happens when people actually try to do the thing.

You’ll learn more from that one session than from ten rounds of revising your outline on your own.

These Options Work Even if Your Course Will Be Self-Paced

Some people assume these options only apply to live teaching. They don’t.

If you’re building a self-paced course, you still test the instruction before you build it. The same three options apply. Follow your own instructions first. Then watch one other person try.

If you can, teach it live before you finalize anything.

The SAT Essay Formula worked as a self-paced course because I spent months teaching it live first. The final format was different but the testing process was the same.

Your instruction needs to be tested regardless of how it will eventually be delivered. Test it first. Then decide on the format.

When a course doesn’t deliver results, the creator usually assumes it’s a content problem. So to solve it, they add more content.

But more content doesn’t fix untested instruction. It just gives people more to get confused by.

So before you release it, test your instruction. Follow it yourself, step by step. And if you can, watch someone else try. Or teach it live first.

You’ll create a much better course as a result. You’ll get the success stories you were hoping for when you built the course. You’ll receive messages from clients saying “I can’t believe how much better I am at this now.”

That’s the thing worth testing for.

Rodney

Want a system that helps you build a course this way, focused, structured, and designed to actually get results?

Check out the Atomic Course Blueprint. It’s 33 pages, a repeatable method for building tiny courses that work, and it comes with a 60-day Smiley Guarantee. You must be satisfied or I’ll refund you.

As always, if you have questions or thoughts on today’s issue, just hit reply. I read every one.

I found a course that would have made me dramatically better at creating stunning videos. I closed the tab immediately.

It was 78 hours long.

For three techniques I needed. That math doesn’t work for anyone with a full-time job, a newsletter to run, and a family at home. The creator put everything they knew into one place and called it a course.

What I needed was 45 minutes on three things.

It existed in there. Buried under content I’d never use. This is what happens when the format comes before the outcome.

And it’s what your clients experience when you do the same thing to them.

Today I’m sharing the three questions that tell you what your clients actually need before you build anything, and the checklist test that might save you months of course production you don’t need to do.

Let’s walk through it.

Nobody questions the default

When coaches and consultants ask me how to monetize their expertise, almost everyone starts from the same place.

“I’m thinking about creating a course.”

That’s the assumed answer. The thing everyone in this space tells you to do.

I get why. A course feels like the right vehicle. You record your knowledge, package it up, and now you have something people can buy. It sounds like freedom.

But here’s what rarely gets questioned: whether a course is actually the right format for what you’re trying to help people do.

That question rarely gets asked. Coaches jump straight to planning the course before they’ve defined the outcome they’re after.

That’s the mistake. And I want to make a case for slowing down and asking a different question first.

Why more information is not more valuable

Too much information is a burden, not a gift.

When someone has to wade through hours of content before they can take a single action, that content becomes friction. They’re not learning. They’re translating. You’ve handed them raw material and asked them to do the work of converting it into something they can actually use.

Most people won’t do that work. Not because they’re lazy. Because it’s hard.

That video course was 78 hours of content. I needed three techniques from it. The creator assumed more content meant more value. It doesn’t. More content means more overhead for the person trying to learn.

Your job isn’t to share everything you know. Your job is to figure out what’s the MINIMUM a person needs in order to take the right actions and get a real result.

That’s a very different question.

The three questions to ask before you build anything

If you shouldn’t start with “what should I teach?”, where do you start?

I ask three questions, in this order.

OUTCOME. What do you want someone to be able to do when they’re done?

ACTION. What are the specific steps they need to take to get there?

OBSTACLES. What’s going to get in their way on those steps?

That’s the order. Outcome, then actions, then obstacles.

The order matters. Start with the outcome and you can work backward to the actions. If you know the actions, you can figure out what obstacles get in the way of each one. And THEN you can ask: what’s the minimum guidance someone would need to move past those obstacles and take those actions?

Not everything you know. Just the minimum.

That minimum is almost always smaller than you think.

Test the checklist before you build the course

Before you build anything, document your process.

Write down every step you take when you work with a client to get the result you’re known for. Get it on paper. Then turn it into a checklist.

Now put that checklist in front of a motivated person and see if they can follow it.

You might be surprised. I’ve seen cases where a well-built checklist was genuinely all someone needed. No videos. No modules. No explanations of the theory behind each step. Just: do this, then this, then this.

I learned this from my own experience. I had taken a course on a really powerful marketing method. It was solid. But when I started using it with my own clients, I realized most of the course wasn’t helping them take action.

What helped? When I distilled the whole thing into checklists and templates. I skipped most of the theory.

They implemented faster. They got results faster.

Did they need to understand the full system the way I had learned it? No. They needed to know what to DO. The checklist got them there.

So: document your process, build the checklist, test it. If a motivated person can follow it and get a result, you have something worth selling. Package it well so people understand its value. Don’t add hours of content to make it feel more legitimate.

You can always build more later. You can’t give people back the time they spent watching videos they didn’t need.

How to know when to add more, and what to add

Now, sometimes the checklist won’t be enough.

That’s okay. When it fails, it tells you EXACTLY what to add.

If someone gets to step three and gets stuck, you’ve just identified an obstacle. Now you know what to create. Not everything. Just enough to clear that specific sticking point.

Maybe it’s a short explanation. Maybe it’s another checklist for that one step. Maybe it’s a template they can fill in. The point is: you work up from minimum, not down from maximum.

This is how you build something people can actually finish. Something they’ll remember getting a real result from. Something they’ll tell other people about.

The goal was never to create a lot of content. The goal was to help someone do something they couldn’t do before.

Keep asking: what’s the minimum intervention that would make that happen?

That question will serve you better than any course outline ever could.

That video course creator spent months on something I dismissed in under a minute.

They built for thoroughness instead of outcome. Your clients are making the same call every time they open something you’ve built and decide it’s too much.

Start with the three questions. Find the minimum. Test it before you build anything bigger.

What you create might be smaller than you planned. And it’ll actually get used.

Rodney

Want a repeatable method for building focused courses?

If you’re going to build a course, or a checklist, or anything in between, you want a system that helps you start from the result and work backward to what actually needs to be taught.

That’s exactly what the Atomic Course Blueprint is built around. It’s 33 pages. No fluff. A repeatable method for creating focused, results-driven courses without the usual overwhelm.

And it comes with a 60-day Smiley Guarantee. If it’s not useful, you get your money back.

Check out the Atomic Course Blueprint here.

Have questions? Just reply to this email. I read every one.

You know more about your topic than most people ever will.

And that’s exactly why your course keeps getting bigger.

Every time you sit down to outline it, you think of another piece someone needs. Another mistake they’ll make if you don’t warn them. Another step you can’t leave out. The outline grows. The module count grows. And somewhere around Module 7, you start wondering if anyone is actually going to finish this thing.

They won’t. And it won’t be their fault.

In today’s edition, I’m breaking down why the “give them everything” instinct backfires, what to build instead, and a 20-minute exercise for finding the one stuck point your course should actually solve.

Let’s get into it.

Every coach who overstuffs their course thinks they’re doing their clients a favor.

When I talk to experts who are building their first course, I hear some version of the same thing.

“I want to give them everything they could possibly need to succeed.”

I get it. You’ve spent years figuring out what works. You have a whole process, a signature framework, hard-won wisdom from working with real people. And now you’re putting it into a course. Why would you leave anything out?

Here’s the thing. MORE is not BETTER when it comes to learning.

Piling on too many strategies, too many steps, too many “but wait, you also need to know this” modules doesn’t set your clients up for success.

It almost certainly ensures they’ll fail.

And here’s the painful irony. The coaches and consultants who make this mistake aren’t doing it because they’re lazy or sloppy. They’re doing it because they care. They want people to succeed so badly that they can’t bring themselves to leave anything out.

But caring too much about what you give people, without caring enough about what they can actually absorb, doesn’t help them.

More content doesn’t mean more results. It often means fewer.

People can only learn so fast.

Overload someone with information and they don’t just slow down. They stop. They fall behind in Week 2 and feel guilty about it. They set the course aside for a weekend they never find. And a course someone doesn’t finish produces exactly zero results.

No results means no testimonials. No testimonials means no word-of-mouth. No referrals. No repeat buyers.

The massive, comprehensive course you built to guarantee their success ends up producing the opposite.

This isn’t about your clients being lazy. It’s about how humans actually learn. We need time to absorb. We need to practice. We need to get a win before we’re ready for the next challenge. Stack too much on top of that and none of it happens.

The goal of a course is a result. Not coverage.

About 20 years ago, I built a course that taught exactly one thing.

I was creating a test prep course for the SAT. Three sections of that test I could have covered. Critical reading, math, and the essay.

I chose one: the essay.

Why? Because the essay was where my students were scared. They’d sit down to write and freeze. They didn’t have a system. They were winging it, crossing their fingers, and hoping for the best.

So I built a small course around one skill set. The specific, teachable steps that would let someone sit down, follow a clear process, and produce a high-quality essay in 25 minutes. Every time.

That was the whole course.

Could someone benefit from learning the other two sections too? Sure. But this one course took a student from “I’m going to screw this up” to confident and prepared. That’s a real result. That’s a valuable outcome.

One slice. Still tasty.

He launched a big course to crickets. Then he broke it into pieces, and they sold.

Jari Roomer is a productivity expert and prolific course creator. He built a comprehensive course covering his entire system for helping people get more done.

It launched to crickets.

Hardly anyone bought.

So Jari broke it apart. He turned the big course into a series of smaller courses, each one solving a specific problem.

They sold.

Why?

Because not everyone had ALL the problems his big course was designed to solve. But plenty of people had ONE of those problems. And they were happy to pay to fix that one thing.

The comprehensive course was trying to be for everyone. The mini-courses were each for someone.

That difference shows up in your sales numbers.

Every outcome your clients want comes from a series of steps. People get stuck somewhere along the way.

Sean D’Souza teaches a 14-step process for writing articles. He covers the whole thing in a three-month course in which you get feedback five days a week.

Clients who used to struggle for hours to produce one article, graduate with the ability to produce a high quality article in 90 minutes or less.

He also sells mini-courses: one on writing headlines, one on outlining, one on storytelling.

Each one is valuable on its own. Each one makes you a better writer. You don’t have to go through all 14 steps at once to get something genuinely useful from his work.

Comprehensive is not the only way.

Think about your own clients. Think about the outcomes you help people achieve. There are steps involved. And somewhere along that path, there’s a point where people consistently get stuck. Where they hit a wall and don’t know what to do next.

That stuck point is a course.

Not the whole map. Just the place where people keep getting lost.

Here’s how to find your course idea in the next 20 minutes.

Try this.

List out every outcome you’ve helped a client achieve. Write them all down. Don’t edit yourself. Just list.

Now circle the three that sound juicy. The ones people WANT, not just the ones they technically need. The kind that, if you told someone at a dinner party you helped people achieve this, they’d put their drink down and say “wait, tell me more.”

Pick one.

Now list what a person actually has to DO to make progress on that outcome. The real steps. The ones your clients go through when they work with you.

Somewhere in that list is a place where people get stuck. Where progress stalls. Where they need help and don’t know where to turn.

That’s where your course begins.

You don’t need to teach everything. You just need to teach THAT.

Coaching your clients means meeting them where they are. Not dumping everything you know on them at once.

The coaches who make the “whole enchilada” mistake aren’t wrong to want their clients to succeed. They’re wrong about what success requires.

Your clients don’t need everything. They need the right thing at the right time.

Give them that. One focused, teachable, genuinely useful thing. And they’ll finish. They’ll get a result. And they’ll come back for more.

One slice is still tasty.

Rodney

If you want a clear, repeatable method for building a focused course like this, the Atomic Course Blueprint is 33 pages with everything you need to get from idea to finished course. There’s a 60-day Smiley Guarantee, so you can try it completely risk-free.

Check it out here: https://roddaut.gumroad.com/l/atomic-course

There’s a physical therapist in California whose approach to physical therapy eventually got adopted by Kaiser Permanente, a major healthcare organization serving millions of patients.

But for years, he couldn’t teach this approach to any other physical therapists.

His clients would ask him for more exercises.

That’s how bought in they were. His method of coaching his clients worked. But every time he tried to teach his approach to other physical therapists, they left excited but nothing changed for them.

He knew what to do in his own practice. He just couldn’t help other clinicians.

That’s the problem most experts run into when they try to build a course. Their knowledge is valuable. Their results are real. But translating what you do intuitively into something another can follow? That’s a different skill.

Today I’m going to show you the exact process I used to help him break his approach into teachable steps, and how you can do the same with yours.

Let’s walk through it.

Before you design anything, answer this one question

What do you want someone to be able to DO when this is over?

Not understand. Not appreciate. Do.

That single question changes everything. It keeps course design from becoming a landfill of everything you know. And it gives you a north star so every decision you make, what to include, what to cut, how to sequence things.

It all has a clear standard.

Experts skip this all the time. They start from their knowledge and try to pour it into a structure. That’s why so many courses end up bloated, hard to finish, and hard to teach.

Start from the outcome. Work backward from there.

And once you know the outcome, your only job is to identify what someone needs to DO to reach it. Observable actions. The steps you could watch someone take.

That distinction matters more than almost anything else in course design.

What happens when you force your process into three steps

Whatever your process is, try to fit it into three steps because that CONSTRAINT forces you to get creative.

When I was a facilitator in Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain program, one of the workshops I taught was about making progress notes. Tiago had a process built around several questions. They were good questions. But not easy to remember without a template in front of you.

I knew that if I told people to set up a text replacement shortcut or deploy a note template every time, some of them would get stuck right there. That friction would kill the habit before it started.

So I made a decision. I needed to make it simple enough that anyone could remember it without a system at all.

I took those questions and broke them down to three steps

1. Action. What did you do?

2. Reflection. What did you learn, or what do you think about what you did?

3. Next Action. What do you think you’ll need to do next?

That was it. Action, Reflection, Next Action. They all end in the same sound. They have a rhythm to them. You can hold them in your head while walking out of a meeting.

That simplification was not easy.

It took real work to figure out what was essential and what could be let go. But THAT is the actual work of building a course. Getting clear enough on your own process that you can hand it to someone else and they can use it. Slides and recordings come after that.

What the hard work of simplification actually produces

Remember Skulpan, the physical therapist I mentioned earlier?

His approach to motivating his clients was so effective they ended up ASKING him for exercises. That’s unusual as physical therapy patients are notorious for not following through. His approach worked.

And every time he tried to teach it to other physical therapists, they said they understood, they said they’d use it.

But when he observed them in practice, nothing had changed. And their patients weren’t asking for exercises nor were they improving at the same rate as his clients.

We worked together to break his approach down. We had to identify what was load-bearing and let go of what was not. But we got his coaching process to four steps.

1. Physical Behaviors, Past and Present

2. Diagnosis Clues

3. Pain Pattern and Irritability

4. Beliefs and Emotions

Four steps. That was it.

I helped him build a course around those four steps. By the time his students finished it, they had genuinely mastered his process. They were doing it with their own patients.

Kaiser Permanente eventually adopted his program. They measured patient outcomes. And what they found was that it was the only intervention that had improved patient outcomes in that area in decades.

Simplification is a gift to your clients

It means you did the hard work in advance so they do not have to. It removes unnecessary friction so the person following your process can focus on doing the thing, not figuring out what the thing is.

When you put in that work, the results your clients get improve dramatically. Not despite the simplicity. Because of it.

Here is where you actually start

Pick one outcome. One specific, concrete thing you want someone to be able to DO after going through your course or program.

Then list every action a person would need to take to get there. Observable steps only. Physical steps, written steps. Cut anything you cannot watch someone do.

Then start cutting. Keep whittling. Push yourself toward three. If you genuinely cannot get there, four is fine. But try for three first. The constraint is the point.

What you end up with is the spine of your course.

You already have a course in you

Some experts believe they need a 15-part system before they can build anything.

Most experts who feel this way have been teaching for years. They have a process that works. They have been guiding clients to real results with a structure they never bothered to name.

The work is to find the thing that is already there, strip it down to what is essential, and make it simple enough that someone else can follow it without you in the room.

That is what a course is. That is all it is.

And you already have everything you need to build one.

Rodney

If you want a step-by-step method for building your first focused course, the Atomic Course Blueprint is 33 pages and a repeatable system that gets you from idea to finished outline fast. There is also a 60-day Smiley Guarantee, so there is no risk in trying it. Take a look here.

Have a question about your own process or how to break it down?

Hit reply. I read every one.

That approach produces courses full of information and short on results. Content-first design optimizes for coverage, not capability. You end up asking “did I teach everything I know?” instead of “can they do the thing?” Those are completely different questions. One of them builds courses people complete and recommend. The other builds courses that live in someone’s purchased-but-unfinished library.

Today I want to share the exercise-first approach to course design: a 4-step process that starts with what your clients need to DO and works backward to the minimum content required to help them do it.

It starts with a bias we all have and almost never notice.

We build courses from our proudest ideas.

Our best theories. Our sharpest insights. The story that finally made a concept click for us. We pour all of it in.

And that’s exactly why most courses underdeliver.

We teach what we’re proud of. That’s the problem.

When you know something deeply, you can’t help but want to share it. The theory behind the method, the nuance that took years to figure out. The analogy that finally makes it land.

None of that is wrong. It’s human.

Your course becomes a showcase of what YOU find fascinating instead of a path to what your clients need to do. That distinction matters more than most course builders realize.

If content doesn’t lead to action, it’s clutter in the learner’s mind. And clutter slows people down, confuses them, and eventually sends them to your refund policy.

The information you’re most proud of is often the information they least need.

I was moving deck chairs on the Titanic.

I’ve been running a coaching training course for seven years. A couple years ago I rewrote it. Recently I went back to update it again and noticed how much I’d grown as a course designer since that last version.

My first instinct? Move things around. Tighten the language. Reorder the modules.

I caught myself. That’s moving deck chairs on the Titanic. Not helpful when the real issue is the iceberg.

The real issue was something deeper. The lessons had too much information. And the exercises, while solid in helping people grasp the principles, weren’t doing enough to bridge understanding and actual practice.

We already had a coaching guide. A script for a key part of the process. But the exercises weren’t built around using it. The guide was treated as a supplemental resource. Something extra. So most people never really used it. It just sat there.

And the guide itself was part of the problem. Too much information. Too many things to hold in your head at once. Not simple enough for someone new to the process.

One of my instructors, Liane, is a coach I trained who has since worked with hundreds of clients using the methods we teach. She had built a different version of the guide. Simpler. Less information. More of “here’s what to say and when.” Exactly what a beginner coach needs to actually run the process.

That’s when I started asking a different question: what’s the easiest way for a beginner to actually start using this approach? The answer kept pointing to a specific guide, a simple one like Liane’s. So the next question became: how do I train someone to use that guide? Every exercise in the course became about building that one skill. Get good at using the guide, and eventually you won’t need it. It becomes a scaffold you naturally leave behind.

That’s the shift. Build exercises around the tool, not alongside it.

What your clients actually need

Learners don’t need everything you know. They need the steps to doing something, and only the information required to complete each step.

Let’s get specific.

Say you’re teaching a group of kids how to dribble a basketball while running. That’s the target skill. The thing they need to do. But they’re struggling with it.

You don’t explain the biomechanics of ball control. You break the skill down.

First, dribble standing still. Then dribble while walking. Then dribble while jogging a few steps. Each stage is an exercise. Each builds toward the full skill. You stay at each level until they’re ready. Eventually, dribbling while running stops being a challenge.

You can do this with any skill. Headlines. Coaching conversations. Pricing strategies. Client onboarding. Break it into components. Build exercises for each component. Teach only what someone needs to do the next exercise well.

That’s the whole design philosophy.

How to actually build this way

1. Start with the concrete outcome. Not “understand the framework.” What will someone be able to DO by the end? “Run a full client session using this process” is a real outcome. “Appreciate the nuances of the method” is not.

2. Figure out what they need to do to get there. What are the actual actions required? Write them down. This step is harder than it sounds because most of us skip straight to “what will I teach.”

3. Figure out how to help them do it. Sometimes that’s an exercise. Sometimes it’s a work guide, a checklist, or a script. The format should match the action. Not whatever feels most impressive to produce.

4. List the obstacles. Where will people get stuck? What will make them skip the exercise or do it poorly? Design something specific for each obstacle. That might be a short explanation, a worked example, or just a clearer set of instructions.

That sequence will do more for your course than reorganizing modules ever will.

But don’t be Miyagi.

You know the Karate Kid. Wax on, wax off. Paint the fence. Sand the floor.

Miyagi had Daniel doing exercises that were teaching him real defensive techniques. Smart design. But he never told Daniel why. Daniel spent weeks doing what felt like chores for someone else until he finally snapped, confronted Miyagi, demanded an explanation. Only then did Miyagi show him: he threw a series of punches at Daniel, who blocked every one without thinking, using the exact movements he’d been drilling all along. Daniel finally understood what he’d been building.

That revelation should have happened on day one. That’s the teaching failure. And it was completely avoidable.

When you give someone an exercise without explaining its purpose, you’re asking them to trust you blindly. Some will. Most won’t. They’ll skip it, do it without real engagement, or just stop showing up.

Tell people why they’re doing each exercise. Make the connection between the exercise and the outcome explicit. Let them ask questions.

Research on motivation is consistent here: when people understand the purpose behind a task, they engage more deeply and they learn more from the practice. A lesson that exists purely to explain WHY an exercise matters is a legitimate lesson. Don’t cut it.

The thing we forget

We got into this because we know something worth knowing. The expertise is real. The desire to share it is real.

But the best thing you can do for the people you teach is resist the urge to share everything. Instead, figure out what they need to do. Build toward that. Strip everything else out.

Your ideas and stories are valuable. Your frameworks work.

Just make sure they’re in service of action. Not in service of your pride.

Rodney

If you want a repeatable system for building focused, results-driven courses:

The Atomic Course Blueprint walks you through this process step by step. 33 pages. A method you can use again and again. And a 60-day Smiley Guarantee. If it doesn’t help you build a better course, you get your money back.

Get the Atomic Course Blueprint →

Reply and let me know what landed for you. I read every response.

I found a tool a couple of years ago that promised to build a complete course from just a topic. So I tried it.

The table of contents it generated was thorough. The section titles were logical. The structure looked like a real curriculum. Then I read what was inside. It was generic. Nobody’s real experience. Nothing that couldn’t have been assembled by someone who had never helped a single person in the niche. The tool worked exactly as designed. That’s the problem.

Today I’m walking you through what actually works: how to use AI to write your course so it carries your unique ideas and experiences because THAT is what makes a course worth building.

Let me show you what I mean.

The seductive promise that should make you nervous

If AI can generate a course on your topic without knowing anything about you, your clients can generate that same course for themselves. What they actually need from you is everything AI can’t replicate: your real experience helping people, and the hard-won understanding of what actually gets them unstuck.

Strip that out, and you’ve built something nobody needs to buy.

The writing isn’t the bottleneck. The thinking is.

When most course creators try to use AI to help them build a course, they assume it will handle the heavy lifting. It won’t.

The hard part is the thinking. How do you take someone from where they are now to where they want to be, with the minimum steps, while handling whatever is actually in their way?

That requires knowing your clients. What are they struggling with that they can’t even name yet? What do they think they need versus what they actually need?

AI cannot answer those questions. Only you can. Because only you have the experience of sitting with real people and watching where they get stuck.

Once the thinking is done, the writing is actually the easy part. AI can help you enormously at that stage. But it cannot do the thinking FOR you.

What it looks like when this actually works

At the Lefkoe Institute, I regularly write what I call “random learning” articles for clients in the middle of a course. Fast and unpolished, no hooks needed. I’m writing for people who are already enrolled, already doing the work, using examples straight from their exercises.

When some of those materials needed to reach a broader audience, I brought AI into the process.

I didn’t hand it the articles and say “clean these up.” Instead, I had AI ask me questions about the new audience. I answered those questions. We worked back and forth: tightening the writing, adjusting the examples, building better hooks, generating exercises.

The result was meaningfully better than what I started with.

But here’s why it worked: the thinking was already done. The design was locked in. I’d already figured out how to get people from A to B. AI helped me shape and sharpen what existed. It didn’t have to create anything from nothing.

THAT is the model. Do the thinking first. Then bring AI in to help you express it.

Co-writing and ghostwriting are not the same thing

People use these terms interchangeably. They shouldn’t.

When you work with a ghostwriter, THEY drive. They have their own process and their own questions. Their job is to take the mental load off you so you can express ideas and let someone else formulate them into writing.

Co-writing with AI is different. YOU drive.

You decide the approach. You check every output. If something doesn’t sound like you, say so. If AI invents something you can’t stand behind, cut it.

And AI will invent things. I was helping write an article for a client using AI, and it produced a compelling case study. Well-written and confident, but completely fabricated. When I asked where it came from, it told me it had made it up.

Out it went.

The rule I use: if I can’t verify it from my own experience or my client’s files, it doesn’t go in. Your course should only contain what YOU can stand behind. That’s what makes it yours.

The moment AI becomes the driver, you’ve lost the thing that made the course worth building.

A process that actually works

One thing comes first: the outcome. What will your client be able to DO when they finish your course?

Once you’re clear on that, here’s how to use AI as your thinking partner:

1. Use Ev Chapman’s Five Question Framework. Tell AI what you’re building and what outcome you’re working toward. Then ask it to ask YOU five questions. Answer those questions — by typing, or by recording a voice note and getting it transcribed.

2. Feed your answers back and build the outline together. Ask, answer, refine, repeat. You’re not drafting yet. You’re thinking out loud with a tool that can hold the thread.

3. Use voice notes whenever you’re stuck. Talk through your ideas, get them transcribed, and hand that transcript to AI: “Help me turn this into a lesson outline.”

4. Set this rule from day one and don’t skip it: “Do not make anything up. If you don’t know something, ask me a question.”

AI is the car. You are driving it. Every decision, every word in the finished course: that’s yours.

The thing AI can never replace

Remember that tool I looked at, the one that promised a complete course from just a topic?

It could produce something. I’ll give it that.

But it couldn’t produce YOUR course. Because your course isn’t made of general knowledge. It’s made of what you’ve learned from actually helping people. The mistakes you watched clients make. The things you figured out because nothing else existed yet.

AI can help you write all of that down. It’ll ask you the right questions and help you tighten the language into something worth publishing.

But it can’t replace the person behind it.

That’s you.

Rodney

P.S.

I’m thinking about creating a workshop that walks you through how to use AI ethically and responsibly to build your first or next online course.

If that sounds like something you’d want, drop a comment below or send me an email. I’ll add you to the interest list.

One group signed up for the waiting list in the hundreds. The other barely cracked a dozen. Same program. Same price. Completely different message. What I learned from that experiment is something most coaches and consultants never think to test. Today I’m going to walk you through the one mistake that’s quietly killing your promotional emails, and a simple way to fix it without rebuilding your entire list.

Let me explain what I mean.

What is the One Bucket Mistake?

The One Bucket Mistake is when you send the same message to every single person on your list, as if they all have the same problem, the same goals, and the same reason for showing up.

They don’t.

Some people found you because they’re trying to grow their business. Others found you because they’re going through a personal transformation. Some want to learn how to coach clients. Others just want to get better at something for themselves.

When you message everyone the same way, you end up resonating deeply with almost nobody.

Why this mistake is so easy to make

It feels logical, right? You have a list. You have an offer. You send the offer to the list.

And if you’re on a platform like Substack, segmentation isn’t even easy. There are no separate landing pages by default. You can’t always tell which piece of content brought someone to you, or what they were thinking when they signed up.

So you just... message everyone. It’s the path of least resistance.

But here’s the thing: a weaker, broader message chasing more people will almost always lose to a stronger, specific message aimed at the right people.

I learned this the hard way with a program I market for the Lefkoe Institute.

Here’s what happened

We thought the right message was: “Learn this technique so you can help your coaching clients.”

It made sense on paper. Our list had therapists and coaches on it. Surely they’d love a tool to use with their clients. We created that messaging, sent an email to build a waiting list around it, and just two dozen showed interest.

Then we shifted the message to: “Use this to change yourself first — and if you want to help others with it, you can do that too.”

Hundreds of signups to the waiting list. Higher conversion rates. Same audience. Same program. Completely different result based on the message.

Why that happened — and what it taught me

The people on that list didn’t come to us through a coaching channel. They came through a personal growth channel. They signed up for a freebie about changing a limiting belief. That was their mindset when they arrived — personal transformation, not professional development.

So when we messaged them about helping clients, we were addressing the wrong priority. Personal growth was why they came. Coaching technique was secondary.

Now, when we reached a different group — people who had specifically sought out coaching resources — the “help your clients” message worked great. Because that was their primary interest.

The lesson: where people come from tells you what they’re thinking. And what they’re thinking determines what message will move them.

Three practical ways to stop making the One Bucket Mistake

You don’t need a fancy CRM or a huge budget to start segmenting. Here are three approaches that actually work:

1. Use different freebies to self-select your subscribers

Instead of one generic lead magnet for everyone, create two or three that each speak to a specific problem or interest. Someone who downloads “How to Get Your First Coaching Client” is telling you something very different than someone who downloads “How to Overcome Self-Doubt as a Creative.”

Now you have sub-buckets. And you can message each group about the specific thing they care about.

2. Use a separate email service to track opt-in source

If you’re using Substack as your primary platform, it doesn’t make segmentation easy. But you can use another email tool — even just for your lead magnets — to track which freebie someone opted into. That data tells you what they’re interested in, and you can message accordingly. I use Kit (formerly ConvertKit) for exactly this purpose. It lets me see which lead magnet someone opted into, which tells me a lot about what they’re looking for.

3. Use Substack’s star scoring to identify your most engaged subscribers

Substack actually scores your subscribers based on engagement. Higher star ratings mean they keep opening and reading what you send. Those people are telling you they’re invested. You can afford to send them more, offer them something special, or promote more directly. Don’t treat a five-star subscriber the same as someone who’s barely opened anything.

The goal isn’t to message less — it’s to message smarter

Some people hear “segmentation” and think it means more work. And yes, it takes some upfront thinking. But once you know who’s in each bucket, your messaging gets sharper, your conversions go up, and you stop second-guessing why a good offer isn’t landing.

The problem was never your course. It was that you were pitching the right thing to the wrong people — or rather, pitching the right people the wrong message.

Figure out who’s in your bucket. Then talk to them like you actually know why they’re there.

Want help creating a course that speaks directly to your ideal student?

The Atomic Course Blueprint walks you through how to design a focused, results-driven course built around your specific audience — not a generic one. It’s 33 pages, and you can get through it fast.

Find out more here.

Still here?

Gracias, mi amigo!

One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and tell me: are you segmenting your list right now? Or is everyone in one big bucket? Your answer might shape a future article.

When you got lukewarm responses to your last offer, what did you conclude?

Most coaches conclude the idea was wrong. But lukewarm responses almost always mean one thing: you haven’t found the angle yet. Those are completely different problems with completely different fixes.

Today I’m walking you through how to tell them apart, and the specific signal that tells you you’ve found an angle that actually converts.

Let’s walk through it.

The professor who couldn’t give it away

She built something that worked, then spent six weeks unable to give it away.

Mary Lynn Rayoff was an engineering professor at Georgia Tech. She had noticed for years that her students struggled with group projects. The slackers. The fights. The dysfunction. She dove into the research on effective teams in corporations, adapted the techniques for her context, and built something she called Effective Team Dynamics, or ETD.

It worked. Her students improved dramatically.

So she opened workshops to the rest of the university. Open to anyone. Free.

Nobody came.

She started interviewing people. Students complained about bad group projects constantly. Could they fill 30 minutes talking about how much group work sucked? Absolutely. Would they sign up for a free workshop to fix it? No.

Administrators? Indifferent.

Six weeks. Dozens of conversations. Zero traction.

She shifted her focus to professors. She wasn’t optimistic. She thought most of them were part of the problem. But she’d run out of other options.

Then one professor said something that stopped her: “I don’t want them to think I don’t care.”

Care. She hadn’t suggested that word. It just came up.

She started listening for it in other conversations. It kept showing up. Professors who stayed late, who added material outside the syllabus, who went out of their way for students. They were all driven by the same thing. They needed their students to know they gave a damn.

She tested a new pitch: “When you assign group work and tell your class to just figure it out, they think you don’t care about them. Give me two hours, and I can help with that.”

A professor pulled out his class schedule on the spot. “When’s the earliest you can come?”

Within weeks, she was getting unsolicited calls. ETD spread from the engineering department to other departments, to graduate schools, to other universities. From 2020 to 2025, ETD reached over 9,000 people.

One sentence changed everything.

Pain isn’t always the angle

Not all pain moves people.

You’ve probably heard the advice: find the pain.

It’s good advice. It’s incomplete.

People rationalize pain all the time. They live with problems for years. They build workarounds. They decide the dysfunction is just how things are.

Those professors had pain. Dysfunctional teams, students who weren’t learning, class time wasted. But most of them had already decided it wasn’t their problem to solve. The pain was there. The pain didn’t sell anything.

A neuroscience professor once described it this way. When a patient comes into the ER after a car accident with a broken bone, doctors can’t trust the patient’s pain report. The broken bone is so consuming it blocks everything else. The patient might have internal bleeding or organ damage and feel none of it. Doctors have to check everything, because the patient genuinely cannot tell you where all the damage is.

It’s the same thing emotionally.

Your audience might have ten pain points related to what you teach. But one of them is loud enough to drown out the others. The rest get rationalized away.

You can point at those numbed pains all day. They won’t move.

The angle is the one pain they haven’t figured out how to live with yet. Finding that is the actual work.

“I just want to sleep through the night”

The obvious audience was the wrong one.

Akmann Van-Mary ran a third-party logistics company and spotted what seemed like an obvious opportunity: the trucking payment system was a mess.

Truckers arriving at warehouses had to deal with paper Comcheks, 14-to-18-digit codes, and multiple phone calls just to get paid. From the outside, anyone could see it was broken.

Van-Mary spent weeks at loading docks trying to get truckers interested in a better solution.

They weren’t interested.

The broken system was their normal. They’d stopped feeling it.

He kept at it. When he started talking to shippers, the people on the other end issuing those payment codes, one said something he didn’t expect: “I just want to sleep through the night.”

Truckers were arriving at 2am, 3am. Every delivery meant a potential wakeup call. Shippers had been dealing with this for years, but they had NOT made peace with it. That sleepless unpredictability was the one pain still screaming.

Van-Mary built toward that. The audience shifted slightly. The pitch sharpened to the one thing shippers couldn’t normalize.

RoadSync is now valued at $230 million.

What finding the angle actually looks like

You’ll know when you’ve found it.

You’re looking for a specific signal. The moment someone pulls out their calendar on the spot. The “sign me up” before you’ve explained the price. The “tell me where to park $50,000.”

That’s how you know you’ve found it.

Lukewarm responses are not rejection. They’re information. The idea isn’t dead. The angle isn’t found yet.

Start with three real conversations. Actual one-on-one conversations, recorded with permission. Ask about their situation, what matters and what doesn’t, and why something would or wouldn’t matter to them. Then stop talking and listen.

You might miss the gold in real time. Someone will slow down when they mention something. Or speed up. Or say something that sounds small but isn’t. In the moment, you’re focused on the next question, and the signal goes right past you.

That’s okay. Review the transcript afterward. That’s where it shows up.

I teach coaching, and this is one of the most common things I see. A trainee misses a critical moment in a session. When I point it out in the transcript, they always say the same thing: “How did I miss that? It was right there.”

It was right there.

Review the transcripts from those first three conversations. You might not find the angle yet. But you’ll start to see what people care about, what they shrug off, what they keep circling back to. That’s the data. Keep going until something pulls.

So. Back to where we started.

When you got lukewarm responses to your last offer, what did you conclude?

If the answer was “the idea was wrong” — it probably wasn’t. The idea was fine. What you didn’t have yet was the reason someone would care. Start with three conversations. You might find it. You might need more. Either way, you’ll know more than you do now.

Rodney

If you’re building a course and you’ve got the expertise but still working out how to put it together, the Atomic Course Blueprint gives you a simple, repeatable method to go from idea to finished product. It’s 33 pages, it works, and it comes with a 60-day Smiley Guarantee. Find out more here.

A coach I worked with spent months building a course around everything she knew. The content was solid. The methodology was real. And nobody cared.

When your course is built around your expertise instead of your client’s outcome, the ideas feel flat.

Hard to market. Hard to make compelling. You end up with a course that’s comprehensive and forgettable — and you’ve spent months getting there. I’ve watched this happen to coaches, consultants, and authors who had genuinely valuable knowledge and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t landing.

Today I want to walk you through a three-part framework:

1. Outcome

2. Obstacle

3. Bridge

...that gives you a better starting point before you write a single lesson.

But first, let’s look at why this happens in the first place.

What the knowledge trap actually looks like

Here’s the thing about being an expert: your knowledge is your biggest asset. It’s also what leads you straight into this trap.

When most coaches and consultants sit down to build a course, they start with a question that feels completely logical: “What do I know about this topic?”

And then they start teaching everything they know. Because they’re the expert and they don’t want to leave anything out. Their clients paid for this. They want to deliver.

So they add more. And more. And then a bonus module because they thought of something else that might be useful.

By the time they’re done, the course is comprehensive.

And comprehensive is exactly the problem.

This isn’t a failure of effort. It isn’t laziness or carelessness. It’s an innocent mistake that almost every expert makes the first time — and many times after that. You know a lot. Teaching what you know feels like serving your clients well.

But here’s the thing: your clients didn’t buy your course because they want a comprehensive education. They bought it because they want a specific result. And there is a huge difference between those two things.

When you start with your knowledge, you’re serving your expertise. When you start with their outcome, you’re serving their goal.

What happens when you start with outcomes instead

I watched this play out directly when working on curriculum at the Lefkoe Institute.

Instead of starting with “what does a facilitator need to know about the Lefkoe Method?” we started with a different question entirely: “What do we want them to be able to DO by the end of the program?”

We mapped the behaviors. We identified the decisions those behaviors required. We cut anything that didn’t directly support those decisions.

The result? An 80% program completion rate.

EIGHTY percent.

That number doesn’t mean much until you compare it to the industry average. For most online courses, completion rates run somewhere between 3% and 15%. Your clients showed up ready to learn.

The content itself didn’t change. If anything, there was LESS of it.

What changed was the question we asked before we wrote a single lesson.

And here’s where it connects to selling: nearly all of those students went on to purchase the next course. When a student finishes your course and gets a real result, buying what comes next isn’t a hard decision.

What the knowledge trap (and solution) looks like in practice

That coach I mentioned? Here’s the rest of the story.

She came to me wanting to build a course around everything she had learned in her coaching training. The methodology was solid. She knew her material deeply. But when we talked about what she might teach, the ideas felt flat. Hard to market. Hard to make compelling to an outside audience. She was starting from her knowledge, and it showed.

So I asked her a different question: what changes have you actually made in your own life using these methods?

One of the changes she described was this: she used to shy away from talking about her business. It made her uncomfortable. She didn’t want to come across as pushy or salesy. But after working through the methods she now taught, she found herself able to talk about her business with genuine enthusiasm — and feel good doing it.

That was the course.

Not “everything I know about coaching methodology.” But a specific program for businesswomen who wanted to promote themselves without feeling bad about it. We called it Toot Your Own Horn.

Same expertise. Completely different starting question.

Three things to figure out before you write your next lesson

You don’t have to scrap everything you’ve built. But before you write your next lesson — or your next course — work through three things.

1. Outcome: What outcome have you actually helped people achieve?

Not what topics you cover. Not what concepts you teach. What is the real-world change your clients experience? Get specific. “Improved communication” isn’t an outcome. “My client stopped avoiding difficult conversations with her team” is an outcome. The more concrete you get here, the clearer everything else becomes.

2. Obstacle: What obstacles stand between your client and that outcome?

This is where most courses fail. They deliver the knowledge and assume the client will figure out the rest. But your clients are dealing with real obstacles — mindset barriers, skill gaps, habits that get in the way, environments that aren’t set up for change. If your course doesn’t address those obstacles directly, a lot of your clients will stall and not come back. They won’t tell you why. They’ll just disappear.

3. Bridge: What’s your bridge from obstacle to outcome?

This is the part I call the Bridge — the specific things you do that help people move from where they are to where they want to be. Not everything you know. Not your full methodology. Just the moves that actually close the gap between the obstacle and the outcome. This is what the course is made of.

Outcome. Obstacle. Bridge. That’s the foundation.

Everything beyond that is optional.

“But my topic is complex...”

I hear this one a lot.

And yes. Some topics are genuinely complex.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: the more confused your clients get inside your course, the more likely it is that you’re still teaching from your knowledge base instead of their goal.

Complexity is often a symptom of the knowledge trap.

When you start with the outcome, simplicity tends to follow. Not because you’re dumbing things down. Because you’re finally focused on the right thing.

So why do expert courses collect dust?

Because they were built to teach. And clients sign up to CHANGE.

The expert cared. The content was probably solid. But they fell into the knowledge trap — innocently, understandably — and asked the wrong first question.

“What do I know?” when the real question is “what outcome am I helping them achieve?”

Start there. Everything else follows.

If you want a repeatable system for building courses this way, the Atomic Course Blueprint is a 33-page guide to doing exactly that. It walks you through a method for designing courses from the outcome backward — so you know what to build and what to cut before you write a single word.

There’s a 60-day Smiley Guarantee. Use it, apply it, and if it doesn’t change how you think about course design, you get your money back. No hassle.

Grab the Atomic Course Blueprint here.

Until next time, Rodney

Still here? I love that. One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and share: have you ever looked back at a course you built and realized you were teaching from your knowledge instead of your client’s outcome? What did you find? Your response may inspire a future article.

Comprehensive = valuable.

The more modules, the more justified the price. The more content, the fewer refund requests. The bigger the course, the more serious you look.

Most course builders I know hold this belief.

Most of them are wrong.

What makes this belief so hard to shake?

It didn’t come from nowhere.

We grew up learning inside systems that rewarded volume. Thicker textbooks. More hours in the classroom. “Comprehensive” was shorthand for expert. And so when it came time to build our own courses, we brought that same framework with us.

The silent contract goes something like this: I’ll pack everything in: every framework, every caveat, every case study. And my clients will feel they got their money’s worth.

Clients don’t evaluate value by volume.

They evaluate it by results.

And the MORE you put in your course, the less likely they are to get any results.

What “comprehensive” is actually doing to your clients

Let me share some numbers that might sting a little.

According to research by education researcher Katy Jordan analyzing large-scale MOOC data, average course completion rates sit around 22%. That’s even among learners who enrolled intending to finish. Many popular online courses land closer to 10%.

That means for every 10 clients who buy your course, 9 of them may never reach the end.

But nobody names the actual reason.

The culprit isn’t laziness or low motivation. It’s cognitive overload (a phenomenon well-documented in educational research). Cognitive overload happens when the amount of information presented exceeds what a person can actually process. And when it kicks in, learning doesn’t just slow down.

It stops.

A 2019 scoping review in JMIR Medical Education found that focused, shorter learning formats produced positive effects on knowledge and confidence. The authors also noted the need for more research on higher-level outcomes. A 2024 randomized study in the Journal of Learning for Development went further: MBA students randomly assigned to a microlearning format scored significantly higher on learning performance than those going through traditional, longer-format versions of the same material.

And a 2023 randomized crossover study in pharmacy education found that learners preferred shorter, focused learning, rating it higher in satisfaction, even when knowledge outcomes were similar between groups.

Clients don’t finish big courses because big courses were never built for finishing.

They were built for the creator.

You might be building for yourself without knowing it

Completeness Anxiety runs deeper than most course builders expect.

It’s the compulsion to cover EVERYTHING. Every edge case. Every advanced topic. Every “but what about...?” you can anticipate. Because if you leave something out, someone might notice. And if someone notices, they might think you don’t know your stuff.

So you add another module. And another. And another.

Are you seeing the problem?

The extra modules aren’t for your client. They’re for you. They’re armor against the “is that all?” objection. The one that might never even come.

And meanwhile, your client opens Module 1, sees 11 more waiting after it, and closes the tab.

The fear underneath Completeness Anxiety is: “If it’s short, they’ll think I’m ripping them off.”

But here’s the paradox.

The shorter course gets finished. And the course that gets finished gets results. And the course that gets results gets referrals, testimonials, and repeat buyers.

The bloated course gets bookmarked.

What the Smaller Course Paradox looks like in practice

The real job of a course isn’t to share everything you know.

It’s to get your client from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible.

Every module that doesn’t directly move them toward that result isn’t generosity. It’s friction.

Run every module through this filter:

Does my client NEED this to get the result I promised?

The only question worth asking is whether they need it to reach the result. Nice-to-know, interesting, impressive? None of that counts.

NEED does.

If the honest answer is no, cut it. Move it to a bonus section, save it for a future course, or let it go entirely.

This isn’t about making a cheap, watered-down course. It’s about radical focus on the outcome you promised. Because when research consistently shows that focused learning formats improve outcomes and are preferred by learners, the argument for comprehensive courses starts to fall apart.

The belief worth replacing

Comprehensive = valuable is the belief doing the most damage among coaches and consultants who build courses.

Replace it with this:

Focused = valuable.

A short course that gets results is worth more than a long course that never gets opened. A client who finishes your course and achieves the outcome they paid for is your best marketing asset. They tell people. They come back. They leave the testimonials you couldn’t buy.

That’s the Smaller Course Paradox. Build less. Get better results.

Run your modules through the filter. Build for your client.

If you want a step-by-step system for building exactly this kind of focused, results-driven course without the blank-page paralysis or the endless second-guessing, the Atomic Course Blueprint is built for that.

33 pages. A repeatable method. And a 60-day Smiley Guarantee 😃

See for yourself here.

Still here? Gracias!

One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and share: what’s a topic in your area of expertise you’ve been afraid to teach because you worried you couldn’t cover it “completely enough”? Your response may inspire a future article.

What they told me surprised me. They didn’t care about the highest score. They were terrified a low writing score would quietly follow their kid onto a college transcript and work against them in admissions. That fear — not the outcome — was driving every purchase. And once I started talking about that fear in my marketing, everything changed.

That shift came from doing something most coaches and consultants skip entirely.

That’s what voice of the customer research is really for. Not to figure out if your idea is good. You already have the idea. It’s to find the exact language, fears, and desires that will make your marketing actually move people.

Voice of the customer research is simply the practice of going directly to your audience — through interviews, surveys, reviews, or online communities — to hear how they describe their own problems in their own words. Not your words. Theirs.

Why your instincts about your audience are probably off

Here’s the trap most course creators fall into: they assume they already know how their customers think and feel — so they skip the research entirely. Or worse, they do a little research and use it to confirm what they already believed.

They read a few reviews, skim a survey, and nod along — filtering everything through their own assumptions. Anything that fits their existing idea gets noticed. Anything that doesn’t gets dismissed or ignored.

But that’s not research. That’s just looking for permission to keep saying what you were already planning to say.

Real voice of the customer research means staying fully open. You’re not trying to validate your course idea. You’re hunting for the emotional language your audience uses to describe their problem — the specific fears, frustrations, and desires that, when reflected back to them in your marketing, make them feel like you’re reading their mind.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: even if you were once your own customer, your memory of that experience has probably faded and smoothed over. The world has also changed. What felt urgent to your audience five years ago may not be what’s keeping them up at night today.

You need fresh voice. Not your recollection of it.

Why interviews are the most underused tool in your research arsenal

Most course creators, when they think about customer research, think about surveys. And surveys have their place.

But interviews? Almost nobody does them. And that’s a mistake.

Here’s why interviews are so powerful: people tire of answering surveys. They give short answers. They skip questions. They lose interest halfway through.

But people have a lot of energy when someone actually listens to them talk.

One or two well-conducted interviews can give you a depth of insight — and marketing language — you’ll rarely get from even a large survey. You’ll hear things people would never type into a form. You’ll pick up on the emotion behind the words. You’ll follow a thread you never would have thought to include in a survey question.

And the most valuable person to interview? Someone who has recently purchased something in your domain.

Why recently? Because they’re still in the emotional mindset of the decision. They can still remember what triggered them, what they were feeling, what made them choose one option over another. That memory gets fuzzier over time — sometimes it gets rewritten entirely.

When you interview a recent buyer, ask them:

• What led them to make the purchase?

• What features or promises caught their attention?

• Why did they choose that product over the alternatives?

Listen carefully to the exact words they use. That language — their language, not yours — is what belongs in your marketing copy. Record the interview. Take notes. Don’t miss a single golden nugget.

What to do if you have a small audience and no budget

You don’t need a big list or a fancy research tool to start doing this. Here are three places you can go right now:

1. Survey your existing audience — but prioritize the right respondents

Send a survey, but include a question asking if the person has recently purchased any solutions related to the problem you help with. Prioritize those responses first. Someone who has actually spent money to solve this problem has far more useful insight than someone who’s just thinking about it.

2. Mine Amazon reviews

Go find books or courses in your niche on Amazon and read the reviews — especially the three and four star ones. Those tend to be the most honest. People will tell you exactly what they were hoping to get, what disappointed them, and what surprised them. That’s your customer’s voice, unfiltered and freely available.

3. Hang out in the right Reddit communities

Find the subreddits where your audience already gathers. If you serve corporate middle managers, Leadership Reddit is a goldmine. If you serve writers, writing subreddits are full of people venting about their exact struggles. Read the threads. Notice what comes up again and again. Pay attention to the language people use to describe their problems — because that language is what belongs in your marketing.

Start with a hypothesis

Here’s the one thing I want you to actually do after reading this.

Take your course idea and write down what you think motivates your customer to buy it. What problem are they trying to escape? What outcome are they chasing? What are they afraid of? Be specific. Write it down.

That written hypothesis is important, because you always go into research with one — whether you recognize it or not. By putting it on paper, you’re acknowledging it exists. And that makes you more likely to notice when something contradicts it.

Then go into your communities. Amazon reviews, Reddit, wherever your audience is already talking. Look for confirming information, yes. But be especially alert to anything that surprises you. Anything that doesn’t fit your assumption.

That’s where the marketing language lives that will actually move people.

Because your customers aren’t confused about what they want. They know exactly what’s keeping them up at night. They’re already out there talking about it. The question is whether you’ve taken the time to listen — or whether you’re still assuming you already know.

Want to build a course that speaks directly to what your audience actually needs?

The Atomic Course Blueprint walks you through how to design a focused, results-driven course — starting with your customer’s real problem, not the one you assumed they had. Thirty-three pages, no fluff.

Find out more here.

Still here?

You’re a champ. 🏆

One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and tell me: have you ever discovered something surprising about your audience that completely changed how you talked about your work? I’d love to hear it.

Walter Isaacson documented this in his biography Einstein: His Life and Universe. Students who signed up to learn from the greatest scientific mind of the 20th century found themselves unable to follow his explanations. Attendance dropped. The novelty of being taught by Einstein wore off fast when nothing he said made sense.

Meanwhile, somewhere across town, a graduate student with a fraction of Einstein’s knowledge was teaching the same subject — and students were getting it.

That’s not a story about Einstein’s genius. It’s a story about what actually determines who teaches and who doesn’t. And it’s not what most people think it is.

The gap has nothing to do with how much you know

I’ve been working with course creators long enough to see a clear pattern.

The people who build something and get it out into the world are almost never the most knowledgeable people in the room. They’re just the ones who got specific about what they wanted to teach and set a date to do it.

That’s it.

I know this because I lived it. My very first online course was the SAT Essay Formula. I created it after teaching hundreds of SAT classes. I had no email list. No audience. No platform. What I had was a system I’d developed for helping students write well under time pressure — and a clear sense that I wasn’t going to teach those in-person classes forever, so I’d better put it somewhere while it was fresh.

So I built it. I showed it to the students I’d taught that summer. Their feedback: “This is exactly what you taught us.” Good. That was the goal.

I ran Google AdWords. I learned SEO. Eventually I put the material into book format on Amazon. That’s where most of the sales came from. And then something happened that I didn’t expect: a magazine writing about the SAT reached out for an interview. People started contacting me about partnerships. Lunches were offered. Doors opened that had nothing to do with how much money I made.

None of that would have happened if I had waited until I felt ready.

Most people stay stuck in a very specific trap

There’s a concept in psychology called the assessment-locomotion distinction. Think of it as two modes your brain operates in.

Assessment mode is when you’re evaluating: researching options, comparing platforms, asking “what’s the best approach?” Locomotion mode is when you’re moving: building, deciding, executing.

Successful people move between both. The problem is that most of us, especially smart and conscientious people, get stuck in assessment. We research. We compare tools. We read blog posts. We think a little longer. We tell ourselves we just need one more piece of information before we start.

And then months go by.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a very natural response to uncertainty. The brain wants to find the optimal path before committing. But with something like a course, the optimal path doesn’t reveal itself until you’re already building.

The only thing that breaks the pattern

Deadlines. Specifically, deadlines with other people attached to them.

I had a mentor who invited me to do a webinar for his email list. For weeks I kept meaning to sit down, plan it out, and pitch him a date. I had ideas. I just couldn’t seem to land on any of them.

After months of getting nowhere, I read an article about the importance of deadlines. So I picked a date about 30 days in the future, and sent him a message: “Can I do a webinar for you on this date?” He said yes.

Everything changed the moment another person was waiting on me.

The week I was to put on the webinar turned out to be one of the most overbooked weeks I’d had in months. There’s no way I would have agreed to do the webinar if I hadn’t already committed to it. But because I had, I figured it out. I simplified what I was going to cover, cut what didn’t fit, and delivered the thing.

This is also why I built the Atomic Course Blueprint faster than I expected. I was building it in public — posting updates, telling people what I was working on that day — and the social accountability kept me moving. I had people watching. I felt I had to follow through.

There’s a principle called Parkinson’s Law that says work expands to fill the time you give it. If you give yourself a year to build a course, you’ll spend most of that year in assessment mode. Give yourself two weeks, and your brain starts cutting everything that isn’t essential. You stop worrying about the 14-point sales page and write five elements that are good enough to sell.

The constraint is the point.

The other thing that stops people

Imposter syndrome. “Am I even the right person to teach this?”

I once spoke with a woman who had written a book on mindset. She used the tools in that book to push through her own fears and doubts while writing it. When I suggested she could help other aspiring authors do the same, she said: “Oh, they want to talk to a New York Times bestseller, not me.”

Here’s the problem with that thinking. Most New York Times bestsellers aren’t teaching people how to write books. They’re too busy writing and promoting their next one. And more to the point, there are always people who will connect with your style, your story, and your approach who won’t connect with anyone else’s.

Remember — Einstein was one of the greatest scientific minds who ever lived, and a graduate student with a fraction of his knowledge was teaching physics better than he was.

My friend Sean D’Souza makes this point using cookbooks. New cookbook titles come out every year, covering the same recipes that have existed for decades. How many books do we need that have a recipe for chocolate cake? Yet people keep buying new cookbooks because they want that particular author’s way of thinking about dessert. I have several cookbooks from Mark Bittman because I love how he explains things. I’m sure there are others who prefer Julia Child.

You don’t have to be the best at what you teach. You just have to be genuinely helpful to the people who need what you specifically know how to explain.

What “ready” actually means

Readiness isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision with a deadline.

If you’ve been thinking about building a course for more than a few months and still haven’t started, the missing piece probably isn’t knowledge, platform selection, or even time. It’s a commitment to someone other than yourself that this is happening on a specific date.

That’s what creates locomotion. Not motivation. Not a perfect plan. An obligation that makes the decision real.

My colleague Neera Mahajan and I built Two Weeks to a Tiny Course around exactly this idea. It’s a live workshop series where you show up, do the work alongside other people, and leave with a course, an offer page, and the emails to sell it.

The two-week structure is intentional. It’s short enough that you can’t afford to stay in assessment mode. Long enough to actually build something.

If you’ve been sitting on your expertise long enough, the waiting list is open now.

Join the waiting list here →

The workshop series kicks off at the end of March.

Still here? You rock!

Hit reply and tell me — how long have you been thinking about building a course? I read every response.

We had taught this material in live workshops for years. People got results. So we took what worked in the room and moved it online. We added Q&As. We gave assignments. We gave feedback once a week.

And... it mostly didn’t work.

People were going through the course, but they weren’t becoming experts. They weren’t getting the results we knew the material could produce. It was frustrating — because we knew the content was good. We’d seen it work in person.

It wasn’t until we radically redesigned the courses that everything changed. We broke the work into daily tasks — one per day, five days a week. With feedback every single day. That’s just one of the changes we made. But after the redesign, we started seeing people get certified every year. We saw nearly 80% of students move on to the next course in our series. Then close to 100% move on to the third.

The content didn’t change. The design did.

And that’s when I realized something that most course creators never stop to ask themselves:

“Will this actually work?”

What most course creators obsess over (and what they skip)

Here’s what I see over and over again with my clients:

They spend enormous energy asking “Will anyone buy this?” And look — that’s a legitimate question. You should absolutely validate your idea before building. I teach that.

But then they move straight into: How do I market it? What’s the launch strategy? What tech do I use? How do I write the sales page?

And somewhere in there, a much more important question gets skipped:

How do I design this so people actually get results?

This isn’t just an ethical concern (though it is that too). It’s a business concern. If your course doesn’t work, people don’t buy the next thing you create. Word doesn’t spread. The repeat business and referrals that make a course business sustainable — those don’t happen.

At the Lefkoe Institute, we saw the direct business impact of improving our courses. That 80% continuation rate I mentioned? That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because students experienced real results in course one, and they knew they could trust course two.

Quality isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the smarter business decision.

What “results” actually means (and what it doesn’t)

Here’s something worth unpacking: getting results from a course doesn’t always mean the student becomes an expert.

Sometimes people just need to get a project done.

Think about copywriting. If you can help someone write great sales copy for their product without actually turning them into a skilled copywriter — by giving them a system, a template, or even an AI-assisted process that just works — that’s a win. You’re not promising to make them a pro. You’re promising that if they follow your system, they’ll have great copy at the end.

That’s a real result. And it’s one worth designing toward.

Now, if your goal is to help someone develop a skill — truly become competent at something — then the design challenge is different. But the principle is the same: be honest about what result you’re promising, then build the course to deliver exactly that.

How to design a course that actually helps people

This is where a lot of course creators get stuck. They know their content. But they don’t have a process for figuring out what’s actually standing between their students and the result they want.

I use a framework adapted from instructional designer Cathy Moore’s action mapping approach. Before I design a single lesson, I look at four types of obstacles:

1. Environmental obstacles

What’s in the student’s environment that could get in the way? This one gets overlooked almost entirely in online course design. But it matters. For example, in our courses at the Lefkoe Institute, we literally teach students how to organize their materials from us so they can retrieve them later. We’re helping them set up their digital environment before we teach them anything else. Because if they can’t find what they need, the learning breaks down.

2. Skill deficits

What skills do your students need — and which ones are missing? Make a list. These aren’t just the skills your course teaches. They’re all the skills required to get to the result. If there’s a gap, your course needs to address it.

3. Knowledge deficits

This is where most course creators start — and that’s the problem. Knowledge is actually the third thing to look at, not the first. Don’t assume that if students just knew more, they’d do the right thing. Sometimes people have misconceptions that need to be corrected. Sometimes they don’t realize something is important. That’s a knowledge issue — but it’s different from thinking more content = more results.

4. Motivational obstacles

Self-doubt. Imposter syndrome. Fear of judgment. These are real, and they stop students cold. Your course design needs to account for them. A cohort with peer support, daily feedback, small wins built into the structure — these aren’t just nice to have. They’re part of what makes a course actually work.

Once you map out the obstacles in each of these four areas, you can start to see how to organize your training around them. The goal isn’t to stuff more content in. The goal is to remove the specific things standing between your student and the result.

Start with a minimum lovable course — then improve it

Here’s one more thing I want to say, because I’ve seen this go wrong too.

Some course creators hear all of this and freeze. They want to design the perfect course before they launch anything. That’s a mistake.

You don’t need to solve every obstacle on day one. What you need is a minimum lovable course — something good enough to help people get real results, but not so polished that you’re spending six months perfecting it before a single student has tried it.

Then build in a feedback loop from the start.

Give students a free Q&A session after they go through it. Find out where they’re getting stuck. If you’re selling a static PDF course, follow up and ask how they’re doing. Teach the material as a live workshop first, where you can see people struggle in real time.

Design for improvement, not perfection.

The course you launch today should be good. The course you sell a year from now should be better. That’s how this works.

Summary

Most course creators ask “Will it sell?” That’s the right first question. But it can’t be the only question.

Before you finalize your course design, ask: “Will it actually work?” Map the obstacles standing between your student and the result — environmental, skill-based, knowledge-based, and motivational. Then design your course to remove those obstacles, not just to deliver content.

And start small. Build your feedback loop early. Let your students show you where the gaps are.

The courses that sell best over time are the ones that actually help people. That’s not idealism. That’s just how sustainable course businesses work.

If you want a step-by-step system for designing a course that’s both small and high-impact, the Atomic Course Blueprint walks you through exactly that — including how to structure your course around outcomes, not just content.

Find out more here.

Still here?

Merci.

One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and share:

What’s one result you want your next course to produce — and what’s the biggest obstacle standing in the way for your customers?

I read every reply, and your answer might inspire a future article.

We proved it at the Lefkoe Institute. We added a second, slightly cheaper version of an existing product. And instead of customers flocking to the cheaper option, nearly everyone picked the more expensive one.

Sales went up 20%. Revenue went up 30%.

Because we changed the decision people were making using the Yes-Yes pricing model.

What is the Yes-Yes pricing model?

The Yes-Yes pricing model — a term from marketing expert Sean D’Souza — is simple. Instead of presenting your product as a single take-it-or-leave-it offer, you present two versions of it side by side: a regular version and a premium version.

The premium version includes a few valuable bonuses. The regular version is the core product on its own.

The prices are close. We’re not talking about a $97 option and a $497 option. We’re talking about something like $49 versus $45. Or $99 versus $97.

But here’s what that tiny difference does psychologically. It changes the question in your customer’s mind from:

“Should I buy this?”

To:

“Which version should I get?”

Why does such a small price gap actually work?

Because the goal isn’t to maximize the price of the premium. The goal is to make the premium feel like an obvious choice.

When the price difference is too large — say 40% — people start treating them as two separate products. They second-guess themselves. They wonder if the cheaper version is “good enough.” And some of them just don’t buy at all.

But when the difference is small, the reasoning becomes almost automatic: “Why would I not spend a few extra dollars to get these bonuses?”

Even if they’re not 100% sure they’ll use the bonuses, they don’t want to regret passing them up for just a couple of dollars. So they choose the premium.

I’ve tested this across multiple products. Every time, almost no one chooses the regular version.

And that’s exactly the point.

What makes this ethical?

I want to address something directly, because I know this is the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people.

Isn’t this manipulation?

Here’s my honest answer: only if you’re not delivering real value.

The regular version has to be genuinely purchasable. Both options need to be real. The bonuses in the premium can’t be cheap filler — they need to be valuable enough that you could sell them separately.

Here’s the thing. Not every product is right for every person. The reason the Yes-Yes model doesn’t convert 100% of visitors is that some people genuinely aren’t the right fit. But there are people who need what you’re offering and just need a small nudge to say yes. By giving them two clear choices instead of a yes/no decision, you’re helping those people take action on something that’s actually good for them.

A lot of people suffer from indecision. They land on your page, they want what you’re offering, and then they stall. The Yes-Yes model removes that stall.

Manipulation is when you mislead people. This isn’t that. This is making the path to yes a little smoother for the people who already need what you have.

How to set up the Yes-Yes pricing model

Here’s how I’d set it up for a digital product:

Step 1: Start with your premium price. This is the price you actually want to sell at.

Step 2: Create your premium version. Add 1–3 valuable bonuses to the core product. Sometimes one great bonus is all it takes. These should be things you’d be proud to sell on their own.

Step 3: Set your regular price close to the premium. A 10–15% difference works well for lower-priced products. As prices go higher, close the gap further. For example, at the Lefkoe Institute we sell a course where the premium is $1,695. The regular version is $1,660. That’s a gap of just $35 — small enough that the premium feels like the obvious choice every time.

Step 4: Display them side by side. A simple comparison grid works. Let customers see both options at the same time so the choice is clear.

That’s it.

One thing to keep in mind about bonuses

A bonus that belongs in the premium version is NOT the same as extra content that belongs in the core course.

When I built the Atomic Course Blueprint, I had more material than I needed for the main product. Storytelling principles were something I really wanted to teach. But were they essential to the minimum result the course promised? No. So storytelling became the bonus.

The core course covers what you need to outline, write, and structure a great course — in just 33 focused pages, with a 23-day step-by-step plan to finish your course and expert feedback on your outline. The storytelling bonus goes deeper for those who want it.

This is the right way to think about it. Your main product should be the minimum lovable product — everything someone needs to get the result. Your bonuses are the “I wish I could also teach you this” material. Now you can. And it does something useful for your pricing too.

What to do if it doesn’t work right away

Here’s something I love about this model. There’s very little risk.

If you run it and a lot of people are choosing the regular version over the premium, you haven’t failed. You’ve just learned something. Close the price gap a bit more and run it again. As long as people are buying, you can keep adjusting.

The only situation where you learn nothing is if nobody buys. But that’s a different problem — and it’s one the Yes-Yes model can’t solve on its own.

Summary

The Yes-Yes pricing model is one of the simplest shifts you can make to your sales page. You’re changing the decision your customer is making — from yes or no to yes or yes. Same product, same price, different question.

Present a regular version and a premium version. Keep the prices close. Make the bonuses genuinely valuable. And let your customers talk themselves into the better option.

The Atomic Course Blueprint — Want to create a course without the usual overwhelm? The Atomic Course Blueprint gives you a simple, repeatable system to outline, write, and structure a powerful course in weeks, not months. No blank-page paralysis. No endless revisions. Just 33 focused pages, a 23-day plan, and expert feedback on your outline. Find out more here.

Still here? You rock!

One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and share: have you tried anything like this with your own pricing? I’d love to hear what happened.

Every winter, without fail, he drags himself downstairs and runs on a machine he can’t stand. He grumbles about it. He’d rather be outside. But he keeps showing up.

Why?

He’s a competitive runner. When the sidewalks ice over in winter, running outside becomes dangerous. So the treadmill becomes his only option. He doesn’t run on it because he loves it. He runs on it because he can’t not.

That distinction — between people who are interested in something and people who can’t not do something — is one of the most important ideas I’ve encountered about why some courses sell and others don’t.

I came across it through a course called Speedrunning the Idea Maze by Cedric Chin and his organization Common Cog. It’s built around research from several books and dozens of business case studies. One that made a big impact is called The Heart of Innovation by Merrick Furst, Matt Chanoff, Daniel Sabbah, and Mark Wegman. The ideas in that book have forced me to rethink things I thought I already understood — including two experiences from my own career that I had completely misread. The first idea is “authentic demand.”

What is “authentic demand”?

Authentic demand is not the same as interest.

Interest means someone finds your topic appealing. They might click your ad, read your post, or nod along at a dinner party when you describe what you do. But interest alone doesn’t make someone buy. And it definitely doesn’t make them use what they buy.

Authentic demand is different. It exists when something is already woven into a person’s life — when they’re already doing the thing, already struggling with it, already spending time and energy on it whether they want to or not. Authentic demand means that walking away from the problem isn’t really an option.

The competitive runner has authentic demand for a way to keep running in winter. He doesn’t need to be convinced that running matters. He’s already convinced. He just needs a solution that fits where he already is.

Most course creators never ask whether their audience has authentic demand. They ask whether people are interested — and mistake the answer for the same thing.

The wrong lesson I took from a success

Years ago, I worked at the Lefkoe Institute helping to market a program that helped people overcome their fear of public speaking.

It succeeded. People bought it, completed it, and reported real changes. We were proud of it.

So we drew a conclusion: find a niche with a real problem, create a great solution, and you can build a business around it.

That conclusion felt solid. And it was — as far as it went. But it missed something important.

The fear of public speaking program worked because the people we were serving were corporate professionals whose careers depended on their ability to speak. They had been asked to present in front of leadership. They had meetings coming up. They had promotions on the line. They couldn’t just quietly decide to skip the problem and move on.

It wasn’t just that they had a real problem. It was that they couldn’t not solve it.

We didn’t notice that part of the equation. We thought we had learned the full lesson. We hadn’t.

The failure I misread for years

Encouraged by the public speaking success, we launched a program to help people with the mental side of their golf game.

It made sense on paper. Golf is something people care deeply about. Anyone who has played knows how much the mental game matters — the nerves on the first tee, the way one bad shot can unravel an entire round. People said their minds got in the way. We thought we had found a real problem with a passionate audience.

The program didn’t take off.

For years, I couldn’t explain why. We had good testimonials. We even worked with a professional golfer who improved his game. The solution worked. But the business didn’t grow.

I assumed it was a marketing problem. Or maybe a positioning problem. Or maybe golf just wasn’t the right space.

It was only after taking Cedric Chin’s Speedrunning the Idea Maze that I finally understood what had happened.

Recreational golfers — the audience we were targeting — could simply keep playing without ever solving their mental game problem. They didn’t have to fix it. The weekend round would happen either way. The problem was real, but it wasn’t urgent. And most importantly, it wasn’t something they couldn’t not address.

We had taken the wrong lesson from our success. We thought: find a real problem and a passionate audience. But we had overlooked the thing that actually made the public speaking program work: the people we served had no good option to walk away.

With golf, they did. And most of them took it.

The “can’t-not” filter

Before you build a course, it’s worth asking one question: Can the people I’m trying to serve easily walk away from this problem?

If yes — if they can live just fine without solving it — you’re working with interest, not authentic demand. That doesn’t mean you can’t build something. But you’re starting on harder ground.

If no — if this problem keeps showing up in their life whether they like it or not — you’re in a very different position. You’re not convincing people that a problem matters. You’re showing up with a solution for people who already know it matters and are already doing something about it.

This is the “can’t-not” filter from The Heart of Innovation. It’s a simple question, but it changes how you evaluate ideas.

The Semmelweis story is a good illustration of how situations shift. In the 1840s, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis tried to convince surgeons to wash their hands before and after operating. He had data. The death rates in wards where doctors washed their hands were dramatically lower. It didn’t matter. Surgeons ignored him, and he died in obscurity.

What changed? Germ theory. Once Louis Pasteur and others showed the world how diseases spread — through microscopic organisms that live on surfaces, including hands — hand-washing stopped being a suggestion and became a social norm. Parents told children to wash their hands before dinner. Doctors who didn’t wash were seen as negligent. The situation transformed.

After that, selling equipment to help surgeons keep their hands clean became easy. Not because the equipment changed. Because the situation did. Washing hands was now something surgeons couldn’t not do.

That’s the kind of situation you want to find.

How to find authentic demand

You don’t need to wait for a cultural shift to find authentic demand. It already exists in the workflows of the people you serve.

Here’s a simple way to look for it: map out what your ideal customer is already doing. Not what they want to do someday — what they do now, regularly, as part of their work or creative life or professional identity. Write down the actions they take, the tools they use, the people they rely on.

Then look for friction. Where does the process get harder than it needs to be? Where are they coping, improvising, or working around something? Where do they spend extra time because the tools or systems they have aren’t quite right?

That friction is your opening. Not because you’re inventing a new need — but because you’re making something they already do a little smoother and easier.

The best products don’t introduce new behaviors. They improve existing ones. The treadmill didn’t invent running. Google Docs didn’t invent document collaboration. The scrub sink didn’t invent surgical hygiene. Each of them showed up where people were already working and made the thing they were already doing less painful.

The treadmill answer

The competitive runner uses his treadmill because running is non-negotiable for him. Winter doesn’t give him a choice. He uses a product he dislikes because the alternative — losing his fitness, falling behind in his training, showing up to spring races unprepared — is worse.

Your course can work the same way.

Not because you’ve convinced people that your topic matters. But because you’ve found people for whom it already does — people who are already doing the work, already running into the friction, already looking for something better.

Those are the people who don’t need to be persuaded. They just need to find you.

Want to find out if your course idea has authentic demand?

Try the Tiny Course Idea Generator at tinycourseideas.com.

It’s a free tool that helps you explore what people in your area are already complaining about — and from there, you can start to map what they’re already doing, where the friction is, and how you might help them do it with less effort.

That’s where the best course ideas come from. Not from what people say they want someday. From what they’re already doing right now.

Still here? Merci. Hit reply (or leave a comment) and tell me: what’s a workflow your audience is already stuck in — and where’s the friction you could reduce?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking.

The woman who said them was the girlfriend of Kevin Systrom, co-creator of Instagram. The reason she didn’t want to use the app was a simple concern shared by millions.

She didn’t like how her photos looked.

Meanwhile, Kevin’s friend was posting amazing photos all the time. His girlfriend wondered why she couldn’t take photos like that.

Kevin asked his friend the secret. Turns out, it wasn’t photography skill at all—it was filters.

So Kevin added filters to his app. That single feature, discovered through one conversation with one person, helped Instagram explode into the platform we know today.

Here’s what matters: Kevin couldn’t have discovered that insight through market research or planning. He found it by building something, showing it to people, and listening to what they said.

The fear that keeps you stuck

I get emails almost daily from people asking: “Should I create this course? Someone’s already doing it.”

They’re afraid of competition. They’re afraid that more established people will beat them. They’re afraid nobody will choose them over someone with more experience.

But here’s what I’ve learned working with clients over the past few years: a lot of times in business, people choose you simply because it’s you doing it.

When I started my business, I asked every client about their previous coaching experience. Many of them said “none.” They’d never hired a coach before. They met me, liked me, and decided to give it a shot.

There are always people willing to try somebody new for any number of reasons. Maybe you’re the closest person to them. Maybe they like your style—you’re calmer while everyone else is hyper-energetic, or you’re funny while everyone else is serious.

Most human decisions aren’t done through systematic comparison. A lot of our decisions are based on feel, and then we use reason to support them.

What really stops people from starting

Many people nod along when you tell them “you don’t have to be first.” But they still freeze.

The real barrier? They want to be right.

They want to know they’re making the right decision, choosing the right approach, reaching the right endpoint. That need to know everything in advance keeps them stuck.

I’ve been taking a class called Speedrunning the Idea Maze, taught by Cedric Chin. We’re studying case studies of businesses from Hershey’s to TikTok. And here’s what becomes clear: people don’t always have a clear idea of what they’re trying to do before they build these businesses.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. But they all started anyway.

Now, I’m not saying you should practice medicine or law without proper training. But if you’re building a course or starting a business in a field where the barrier to entry is low, you don’t need to have everything figured out.

Maybe the experts in your field aren’t serving the market well. Maybe there are too many gurus making big promises they don’t fulfill, and people want someone more down to earth. Maybe everyone else is super serious, but you bring humor. There are so many possibilities.

Start with what you already have

Researcher Saras Sarasvathy studied expert entrepreneurs and found something surprising: the most effective ones didn’t start with a perfect plan. They started with what they already had—and let what they learned reshape where they were going.

They took full advantage of their current resources. They partnered with people they already knew. And they stayed open to the idea that their original goal might change as they discovered new things along the way.

So before you try to build a massive social media following (which can take years with no guarantee of success), ask yourself three questions:

Who are you? What characteristics and skills do you already have?

What do you know? What have you learned from your own experience?

Who do you know? What connections and relationships do you already have access to?

The inventory you’re ignoring

Start there. Don’t assume you need resources you don’t currently have. A large social media following. A lot of money. More free time than you have right now. None of those are required to begin.

In fact, here’s a useful exercise: make a list. Write down everything you know. Write down everyone you know. Write down your traits, education and past accomplishments. This is your starting point. This is what you’re going to build from.

Talk to the people on that list. Share your idea with them. See who becomes a supporter or cheerleader. Find out who might want to partner with you. And listen to what they say.

You never know who will give you the insight that helps you figure out the next thing. And then the next thing after that.

You are going to build a business from your present starting point. Don’t wait until you have some perfect set of resources to begin.

Never start in secret

Yes, you could spend forever trying to grow an audience. But you could also invite your friends and family to subscribe to your newsletter right now. You should never have zero subscribers when you launch—get your mom, your dad, your friends to sign up.

The biggest mistake I see people make is wanting to start a business privately. They think they’ll tell friends and family once it succeeds. But that’s backwards.

If you can’t get the people who know and trust you to try what you’re building, that’s valuable feedback. When Kevin Systrom’s girlfriend said she wouldn’t use his app, he didn’t hide in shame—he asked why. And the answer pointed him toward the one feature that helped Instagram take off.

How to know if you’re solving the right problem

Here’s a framework I love: go to Amazon and look at books or courses in your field. Read the two-star reviews.

Find out why people were unhappy. Look for patterns. What obstacles kept things from working? Where did people get stuck?

Ignore the reviews that just say “I didn’t like it” or “This sucked” without explanation. Those don’t tell you anything.

But when someone says “I got stuck at this point and they didn’t provide a solution” or “They pointed out this problem but never solved it”—that’s gold.

If a lot of people are talking about the same struggles across similar products, that means nobody in the market is solving it. If you can solve that one thing, people will be interested.

Better execution beats being first

Look at Oreo cookies. They weren’t first—Hydrox was. But Oreo made a better product and became the household name.

Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Friendster was, then MySpace. But Facebook improved on what came before.

The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player. There were many already in the market, and they all had issues. Steve Jobs had his team buy these players, use them, and make lists of everything that was hard to use. Then when they built the iPod, they made sure it had none of those problems.

Don’t enter a market just to copy. Enter to improve.

Find out what’s wrong with the competitors. What’s frustrating about them? Why are some customers lukewarm? Then make sure your version doesn’t have those same problems.

Start smaller than you think you should

If you want to create a course, don’t build yourself a 10-module program right away.

Invite people to a workshop to teach one usable thing. That’s how you start. Get a customer. And teach the workshop even if there’s one person who signs up.

I know someone who cancels workshops when not enough people sign up. I think that’s a shame. Some courses sell better over time as people hear about them more often and plan to take them the next time they’re available.

The same thing happened to me with Ship 30 for 30. I kept hearing about it and thinking “one day I’ll take this.” Finally, I did.

My friend Sean D’Souza built his business doing live presentations. He kept refining his approach based on feedback—especially from his toughest critic, his wife, who kept pointing out what to improve. Eventually he was presenting to full rooms. But early on, he sometimes drove two hours to a presentation only to find out two people were showing up. He did the presentation anyway.

He would have taken much longer to improve as a speaker if he hadn’t shown up to those small-audience presentations.

I did the same thing years ago. In 2008, I learned some amazing motivational techniques and got excited by them. I invited friends to a free webinar to teach what I’d learned. People liked the ideas, but I discovered they didn’t get much out of actually applying them, so I didn’t pursue it further. But I learned something valuable by doing it.

The uncomfortable truth about originality

Here’s a question every course creator should ask: Why are there books published on the same topics again and again every year?

Why isn’t there just one book on French cooking? Why are there hundreds or thousands of them? Why do cake books all have recipes for chocolate cake?

My answer: you don’t need just one. Sometimes people want something from a different perspective, a different style, a different approach.

Maybe people want to hear from you, from your experience. Nobody else is exactly like you. Nobody will express ideas the way you will.

So try expressing them the way you want to. Maybe, just maybe, there are a few people out there who will be grateful you did.

What to do right now

Starting with what you have beats planning for perfection. You just have to make a move in a direction that seems fruitful without knowing everything in advance.

Here are some options for taking that first step:

Run a single workshop—even if only one person signs up. Teach one usable thing and get feedback.

Tell 10 people about your idea this week—friends, family, people you know. See what they say. Listen for insights like Kevin Systrom did.

Look at the 2-star reviews—find the patterns in what people are struggling with in your field.

Choose the one that feels right for you. Or create a better option that makes sense for your situation. Mix and match however you want.

The point isn’t to follow a fixed menu. The point is to start.

Want help turning your expertise into a tiny course?

My Atomic Course Blueprint shows you how to create a focused, valuable course in weeks, not months—without overwhelming yourself or your students. Find out more here.

Need help coming up with course ideas that connect to real problems people complain about? Try my Tiny Course Idea Generator—a custom GPT that helps you marry your expertise with your market. Check it out at tinycourseideas.com

Still here? I love that. One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and tell me: What’s one small action you could take this week to move your business idea forward? Your response might inspire a future article.