This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not, in fact, more. It's with this principle in mind that we are starting Failure Friday, a collection of short stories, all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, so glad you're here. Now, it's just like our Throwback Thursday segment, which conveniently comes out the day before Failure Friday.
You'll hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground. They'll tell you a quick story of something that went very wrong. The stories will vary, but often it starts with an idea, what they thought would happen, and then what really happened, and of course, what they learned. We've had a few different variations of these so far. It's been really cool.
Get a lot of good feedback on it from listeners, and I also really applaud their courage, the people who are sharing these stories. So today's segment features David Lawrence from Los Angeles. Back in episode 627, we brought you the story of an extremely popular app for actors he created. It was a rehearsal app, an app that would help actors rehearse, run their lines. It brought in something like half a million dollars in a relatively brief period of time.
And so fresh off that success, David's thinking like, wow, this is pretty good. So he begins to explore the world of online course design. And some of his ideas come off really well, but not every idea is a hit for sure. So that's what he's gonna talk about here in his update. Why did some succeed and why did others fail?
Looking back, he thinks he knows why. And he even has some advice that might help the rest of us. So let's hear from David. I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
Well, hey, Chris.
It's David H. Lawrence, the 17th, and I'm a television and film actor here in Los Angeles. I also work in voiceover, and I teach others to become professional voice talent as well. And when I first started teaching about a decade ago, I was doing it because people were egging me on to do so. They were encouraging me.
They saw me working in voiceover, and they said, hey, you understand this stuff. We don't, you should teach us. So I'm like, okay, and I did. And I have no formal training in teaching at the time, so I didn't know what I didn't know. The first few courses, they went almost viral.
I mean, they really landed. And as I learned what else my students wanted to learn because I asked them, I really accelerated the creation of classes. I'd built 20 in a matter of a year, and some of them worked out great, and some of them landed with a thud. I mean, crickets. And I realized in the end that it was because I needed to learn more, not about my subject, I knew voiceover from working in the business every day, but rather how to be a better teacher.
I wanted to be an excellent teacher, so I made a sea change. And instead of creating even more courses, I spent time educating myself in world-class teaching skills. I dove deep into instructional design and learned how to structure my courses to be engaging and sticky and my course content memorable. I learned the different modes of learning that students respond to. Some like video, some crave audio, some respond to text, some live feedback.
And I also learned how to be simpler and clearer in my PowerPoint decks. Oh my God, my slides were so complex. I recommend a couple of books. One's called "Brief" by Joseph McCormick, and the other's called "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown. They're awesome for helping you with that.
I took the time to learn about dark mode, because my students learn online, and using dark mode in designing the look of my coursework and my slides matches their new computers, it causes less eye strain, that's why they use it. And I even extended it into my testing, my student support. I learned about and integrated this concept from the late 1800s called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. And if you use this, it can help students retain what they learn, not just for days or weeks, but for life. And this whole process taught me to value not only my information and my courses, but also how much I really owe my students in giving them every opportunity to succeed.
I just had my best year ever, despite the pandemic. And the feedback I've been getting for years now tells me that students really notice and respond to more well-designed coursework. With all the courses you see popping up online, all over the place, just go on Facebook, you'll find a million of them. I think that entrepreneurs that are trying to cash in on that marketplace might be more effective and successful if they took the time to learn how to actually build and teach world-class courses, not just hone their subject matter. Thanks for giving me the time, man.
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Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. I like what David said there about, if you wanna cash in on a course, everybody's making courses these days, go and learn about how to actually teach, like learn about educational theory. There are some things you can learn that will make a major difference in how you're gonna help learners and ultimately how successful your course is going to be. I also like what he mentioned about the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. Now, if you've never heard that before, if you're like, what is that?
The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, it basically describes the decrease in ability of the brain to retain memory over time. And so the theory is that we start losing the memory of learned knowledge, like over time in a matter of days or weeks, unless that knowledge is consciously reviewed time and again. That's a definition I took from Wikipedia, but I have been thinking about this recently just under the name spaced repetition. So you might've heard that term as well, or if not, maybe go and look it up. Spaced repetition, it's a system of teaching yourself and more importantly, making sure that whatever you're learning is going to actually be retained.
So you can carry that knowledge over and over and build on it from month to month and year to year. Lots of interesting applications to that. So I'm grateful to David for helping us out with this segment. Check out his website at voheros.com. That's voheros, like voiceoverheros.com, where he has more than 35 courses.
Maybe it's even more than 40 courses now available. That's incredible. I've made some courses in my life, but I haven't made 40 of them. So well done. I think at least one of them is free if you want to learn more about how it all works.
And if you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, any of that kind of stuff, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll also have a show notes page with links to David's work, anything else we talked about in the episode or just some other resources as well. That will be at sidehustleschool.com/1581. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
