91 - Should you beta test courses?

The Connection | 2021.08.02 | Issue 91

Every online course I launched, I always pushed to beta test it first.

In other words, sell it to a small segment of the audience at a reduced price to measure demand and test the material.

Didn't matter the audience, the production value, or the price of the course. I wanted to test, test, test. 

And why wouldn't I? As the course creator, there's only upside:

• Faster course creation speed

• Faster feedback cycles

• Decreased risk 

When you sit in the ivory tower of “creative," you're silo’ed from the nasty business of, you know,

making money

.

But later, when I started to own parts of the P&L, you realize there are tradeoffs to beta testing: 

• Slower time to (final) product

• Slower time to revenue

• Null hypothesis risk (probability of not learning anything from the test)

After working on more than a dozen online courses and launches, I realized 5 specific attributes of an online course enable (and disable) beta testing, and wrote about it here: 

Someone else you think should read this? Please share with them.

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