This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome friends, listeners, community. You're amazing. You're awesome. Thank you for tuning in today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I'm your host of this podcast.
It's been going for more than 1,700 days, every single day, seven days a week, because I want to support you on the front lines of the new economy. I should say the new economy at this point. We've had multiple new economies. And today, I'm going to answer a simple but important question. What is the best platform to host an online course? Throughout the archives, we have featured a
lot of different online courses and educational programs. And that's because they are effective, they are profitable. I do believe everyone's an expert at something. There is something you can teach that's valuable to other people. So you need to understand the process of transferring your knowledge. What's the best way to do that? How do you work out the logistics? How do you handle
the marketing and so on? And I've actually been working on a new online course myself recently. So I've done a bunch of research into this very question, what's the best platform to host an online course, and I'm going to give you a clear recommendation. The detailed question from our listener and my answer is coming up after this quick thank you to our sponsor. Hey, Chris, Rob from Boise. After listening to Side Hustle School for a while, I'm ready to
create an online course. You've had a lot of episodes and stories about people who've done that. And I'm wondering, everything you've heard, what do you think is the best third-party platform to host a course? I don't mean a company like Udacity that sells courses that other creators make. I mean the ones that like that let you host your own and keep all the money that comes in.
Thanks, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Rob, what's up, man? Thank you for the question. Just a couple of clarifying points. When Rob mentions he doesn't mean a company like Udacity. So Udacity, CreativeLive, LinkedIn Learning, Skillshare, there are many companies
that have their own platform where they are actively selling third-party courses. They have this big marketplace. You're making a course, you're selling it to their audience. And what Rob is talking about is a different kind of platform where you basically own all of the content and you have control over every element of how the course is made. And as Rob mentioned, you keep the money. There might be some small processing fees you pay, but mostly you pay this
platform a monthly fee for the use of their service. So pros and cons to everything because in this case, you're keeping all the money, you have much more control, but you don't have that built-in audience. Therefore, you have to do your own marketing, provide the audience, and so on. So I'll give you my recommendation based on my own research and what I'm planning for myself. But I would say first and foremost, the platform you choose is far from the most important variable in your success. And honestly, there's a lot of great platforms now. Any of the major ones will
probably work just fine. The three that I kind of narrowed it down to for myself, and I don't have any relationships with these companies, the three are Thinkific, Teachable, and Kajabi. I have friends who use each of them. I honestly think it's a lot like web hosting or your email newsletter platform. Like if you're already using something and you like it, there's really no need to change. Okay,
because a lot of them offer the same kind of features and such these days. Now that said, for me, I am using Thinkific. So that's what I'm going to use going forward. I really like the resources they have and how intuitive the course builder is. I also like that you can dive into a lot of advanced features if you want, which in my case I do, but you don't have to. And so that's
what I'm going to be using for my upcoming course. It's called Thinkific. And I'll tell you about that course at some point. But for now, I hope this answer helps Rob and anybody else out there who is also busy creating lots of great platforms out there, pick one and move forward, focus on the content, focus on your audience, how you can best serve them. That is the ticket to selling profitable courses. All right, thanks for tuning in today. If you've got a question yourself,
sidehustleschool.com/questions. We will continue to feature them throughout the year. New episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
From the Onward Project.
