This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings, thank you for tuning in today. You're listening to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Today we're gonna look at a listener question that was inspired by a new course I launched. So we recently launched this new course called Idea to Income, and the course is very short, compact, it is delivered entirely through SMS, also known as text messaging.
And apparently it's got some of my listeners thinking about how they can do this in their own way with their own topic, which is great. You know, good for you. I wanna show you how you can make various digital assets so that you can do exactly that and hopefully do well with them. So how can you put together a text messaging course? How should it be structured and how can you manage it technically?
There are a few different aspects to this, so I'll try to be concise and give you the most important points. That is the listener question coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Hi there, Chris. This is Luna from Boston, and I just recently started following the show with the beginning of the year. Thanks for all the helpful content.
I saw that you're making a course that delivers daily lessons through text messaging. That looks cool, and I'd like to try doing it myself. My idea is to teach parenting tips through a series of audio messages and prompts. How did you put yours together? And what did you learn along the way?
Looking forward to hearing from you. [Music]
Hey Luna, thank you for listening. Thank you for your interest in making a course of your own. I think that is very cool. So for me, I think I actually forgot to mention earlier, listeners, if you have not seen that course yet, if you would like to, just come to courses.sidehustleschool.com, courses.sidehustleschool.com.
And to make this one, I worked with a company called Authorative. You can find them at Authorative.co. They were referred to me by Gretchen Rubin, who also has two courses, at least with them. And I really enjoyed working with them. I wouldn't want to do it on my own, but the systems involved are not that complicated.
So for me, I didn't want to do it on my own because there's a lot of stuff that I just don't want to manage or deal with. But if you're trying to figure it out entirely DIY, it is possible. Okay, so basically what you need is a platform that can deliver SMS messages. I actually used to use one for something else, and that one was called Twilio. That's one of the leading providers.
So it's twilio, T-W-I-L-I-O.com. You can go and add phone numbers and then program in a series of messages that go out once a day or however often that you would like. And just think about this as a consumer. If you get texts from businesses now, even for something as simple as, like when you go to a restaurant and you join the waiting list, they usually use a service like this. And to create a course that uses this method, it's just a matter of structuring those messages in a curriculum than delivering those messages over time.
So the only thing that's really different is the delivery mechanism. I think it's cool because texting has very high engagement. Like most of us see every text message we get, usually within a few minutes or at least an hour or two, and you can't say that about email or any other method. So I would say overall it's very similar to making any other kind of course except for the delivery mechanism. And the last thing I would note is that even though my course is fairly simple, it still took a good amount of work from me, perhaps more than I expected.
And that's my fault because at first I thought, oh, I just need to create 21 messages. We're delivering this course over 21 days, but there's actually a lot more since we use prompts to guide users through a decision tree. So there's actually a lot more than 21 messages that needed to be made in my case. So I guess the point there is even something simple takes work, but that shouldn't scare you off, right? Good luck Luna, good luck anybody else.
Let me know if I can be helpful. And if you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you for tuning in today. Subscribe or follow wherever you listen, and I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
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