Success vs Failure in Online Education Companies

In this episode of LMSCast, Chris Badgett reunites with longtime collaborator Kurt von Ahnen to dissect the core patterns that determine who wins and who fails in the online education space. Drawing on decades of combined experience—from WordPress trenches to corporate training rooms—they explore what sets high-performing education entrepreneurs apart from the rest. Spoiler alert: it’s not flashy tech or funnels—it’s mindset, clarity, and grit.

One of the biggest takeaways is the power of intention and mindset. Too many aspiring course creators fall for the passive income myth or assume their expertise alone guarantees success. Chris and Kurt call this “mechanism-first thinking”—where creators obsess over tools and course content, but neglect the human they’re trying to help. The ones who make it focus first on who they serve, often building solutions for a previous version of themselves. That clarity eliminates guesswork and builds authentic connection.

Curriculum design is another major pitfall. Many creators overbuild, launching “giant courses” that overwhelm learners. The better approach? Keep it simple. Chunk lessons into small wins, design for clarity, and think about your learner’s level—beginner, intermediate, or advanced. Don’t skip levels. Build bridges. And remember: tools like AI can help you fill in gaps, but they won’t replace doing the hard work of thoughtful design.

Sales and marketing, too, require grounded expectations. Chris lays out four proven strategies: content marketing, relationship-based outreach, outbound prospecting, and paid ads (as a later-stage scale lever). Kurt reminds us that selling to many—through groups, businesses, or institutions—can be far more efficient than chasing one-off buyers. They share real stories of clients using LifterLMS Groups to deliver training at scale, from safety certification to corporate development programs.

Finally, success requires personal discipline, continuous improvement, and the humility to keep showing up. Whether it’s updating your course yearly, listening to student feedback, or time-blocking your calendar—this work is more marathon than sprint. Chris and Kurt close with a simple truth: your learners will come for the content, but they’ll stay for the support and the community. That’s where the real transformation—and real business success—happens.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: [00:00:00] You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined, or I should say rejoined by a special guest. His name is Kurt Von from Manana Nomas. He also does some work over here at Lifter LMS, and we wanted to have a conversation around some of the patterns we see among the education entrepreneurs that create great success for themselves, and then also the ones that end up.

A unsuccessful or failed situation. But first, welcome back on the show, Kurt.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Thanks Chris. It’s good to be back. I always enjoy chatting with you. [00:01:00]

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we’ve been doing this for a long time. You’ve been around WordPress, I think, longer than me, since 2006 or something. 2004. Four, okay. I came in 2008.

And and you’ve been a educator and a leader. You’ve done projects, you’ve worked with clients. I also have done those things. But I wanted to start out first talking about mindset and intention. If somebody wants to create an online education company, and let’s say they’re charging money for your, for their courses or their coaching or whatever it is what patterns do you see that are those that become successful have and those that it never quite works out have when it comes to mindset and intention?

Kurt Von Ahnan: It becomes a multifaceted question, right? So obviously there’s gonna be multiple answers for this, but I see I’m gonna run the risk of sounding judgmental, [00:02:00] right? But that’s part of how this show’s gonna end up. Some people come to the game with an expectation that is very much beyond reality.

They make an assumption that they are. Known, or they’re a celebrity in their field, or they have knowledge that no one else has or that it’s an assumption. So the assumptive of, I’ll just build it and they’ll come, whereas, there’s that cliche, right? All things worth doing take work and there’s sometimes.

The real labor, the real work of launching something successfully has not set in. And so when they have their launch, they get excited, I’m gonna launch a new site. And you go, great. Have at it. And then they launch it. But their launch doesn’t include any, I. Superfluous stuff on the outside. It’s just I made the website live.

You made the website live. How did you think people were gonna get to it? How did you think people were gonna make a purchase? What? What copy do you have on your website that inspires someone to [00:03:00] make a purchase? Do they even understand that you have an offer on your page? And I think that’s. To, to me, we could get into the nooks and crannies of actions, but the question is about mindset and intent, and I think there’s too many.

There’s too many scammy things online that are saying, e-learnings a trillion dollar industry. Get your piece of the pie now make a new course. And you could drive a Lamborghini just like mine and it, and they’re skipping the whole part about it takes work. You have to be committed. Build a community, you have to moderate it.

You have to constantly, it, it’s a job.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Solid points. I see a common mindset. I call it us versus them. Focus. So if somebody’s really focused on themselves and like they want to make money online and have location freedom and financial freedom and all this like freedom you gotta help people.

So like the ones that really work out, their intention is to go [00:04:00] help somebody. And the ones that are the most successful, it’s often like a previous version of themselves angela Brown who teaches house cleaning and maids, how to start and scale their companies. Yeah, she was a house cleaner.

She’s, been walked a hundred or a thousand miles in those shoes before, and she had done education in the offline world to that industry. But she also wanted to make money online and she wanted to be able to retire and have location freedom. So that stuff’s not bad. But she knew very well that she would have to help a lot of people.

Get what they want. I, you probably know that, I think it’s Zig Ziglar or one of those lines, if you help enough people get what they want, you’ll get what you want.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah, exactly. That’s very

Chris Badgett: true.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Very true. Yeah. And you mentioned an interesting thing. I’ve learned almost the hard way that you can have a passion point for a subject.

Maybe you don’t have access to the right audience. Maybe you don’t have, the purchasing power to the right audience is the right way to say that. [00:05:00] And so then you need to get creative and say, okay, am I really working on a B2C product? Or is this really a B2B product or is this a and that comes back to mindset and intent, right?

If you’re intent add value to people, one person at a time, quality connections. But that’s one thing. And then there’s the, b2B model, right? I’m gonna sell one to many. And so then who are you making that relationship with and what’s the intention and mindset there? They’re two very different models and they take a different perspective of attack.

Chris Badgett: I think moving on to another topic, one of the most important issues or questions is literally one word, and it’s who with a question mark, who are we making this for? I see a lot of people get caught up in what I call mechanism first thinking. It’s all about the process and the knowledge, and this is what I do, but who are you actually helping with that?

Oh people who want this process, but no. Who are they? We know this whole thing about the customer [00:06:00] avatar, the ideal customer profile. But definitely the projects I’ve seen with people using Lifter lms, where it works out. The audience is super tight. It’s I think if KPC with her active Campaign Academy, yeah.

These are like marketing automation people using active campaign who are, various levels of tech. It’s very specific who she helps, just like Angela Brown with house cleaners and maids or funk Roberts with men over 40 who are trying to get in shape and, worried about low testosterone and stuff like that.

It’s super specific and Yep. I think u is the, it’s the fundamental most important question. Once you have your why and your mindset and your intention, who are we gonna help? My biggest pro tip is just help a previous version of yourself. ’cause you’re, there’s gonna be less guessing. You already know where you came from and who these people are.

But you can also branch out, but get [00:07:00] really clear on who that is. What do you say about audience and finding product market fit?

Kurt Von Ahnan: I have such a diverse background in training, e-learning, corporate models versus, course creator models, and they’re two very completely different markets. And so you nailed that who thing, but who are you helping?

Who are you adding value to? The next question is who has the purchasing power? And then that kind of changes might change the content flow, might change the user experience, might change some tools that gets into the mechanism side of it. But I think of this a lot and I’m very involved at church.

I’m a person of faith. A lot of times we’ll say, oh, invite someone to church. Invite someone to church. Oh, that feels so awkward. How would I do that? I don’t wanna, beat people over the head with a Bible. And then you have to think what got you to go to church? Someone invited me, right?

And so then it’s okay, that is a previous version of yourself. And so many times people forget [00:08:00] on the, they got so involved in becoming the expert in their field that they forget how they got started in their field. You have to go all the way back to the roots of it. At fear of running long I’ll tell you, I created a master level course on electronics diagnosis for motorcycles, and I was so excited to teach the course.

I was actually a little scared to teach the course ’cause I thought the students knew more about some of the topics than I did. And we taught the course and it was, some of it was online and some of it was live. So we’re doing the practicum where we’re live and I’m. eScribing, the courseware, and they’re all shaking their heads.

And then I handed each of ’em a multimeter and I said, okay, let’s go see how many volts are in this line. And I thought that’s the dumbest, simplest thing I could ask them to do. And not a single person in the course did it correctly. And I was like, wait a minute, I’m giving a master level course on motorcycle diagnostics with electronics, and nobody knows how a multimeter works.

That makes you realize that wherever you’re at in your level of [00:09:00] training, that previous version of yourself that you mentioned, you have to go all the way back to the first square. You can’t start on the 10th square and go up. You have to cover everything from the beginning and then get people to a level of engagement and take ’em to the next level, which is awesome.

Chris Badgett: And I also have a car, a really simple for you, car battery question that I’ll ask you after this call. Let’s go into like actual course creation or product creation. The design of the curriculum. Not so much the tools yet, but this is an area where I see a lot of pitfalls. One of ’em is, like you said, creating a master’s level course.

All of a sudden we have, I just call it a giant course. This thing is just a monstrosity, right?

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So we’re not thinking about levels like are we working with beginners, intermediate, advanced? Do we need to do several courses and bundle those as a membership instead of trying to overwhelm people? Do we need to use prerequisites to you gotta [00:10:00] kind of master this area first before you move over here.

So think about it. And oftentimes the best advice is just to keep it simple. And this goes back to the avatar, the person that you’re helping. What’s the problem they have? What’s the result that they want and what are the minimum steps required to get them from A to B and overcome any challenges along the way?

Don’t overcomplicate it. I personally find AI helpful at this stage, particularly if you’re not trained as a teacher or a designer, like you gotta do the work. Don’t just ask the AI to design a course outline for you, but go ahead and try your best to design. Sections and lessons yourself, and then ask AI to fill in the gaps.

And that’s where you can get some back and forth and get really a comprehensive and uncover some blind spots in your curriculum. But what would you say about like curriculum design?

Kurt Von Ahnan: It’s a fickle beast. There’s a lot in the l and d spaces, learning and development. So in the l and d spaces.

[00:11:00] There are a lot of professionals that will talk about chunking and micro-learning and all of these topics, meaning like what you said, take a big topic and break it into consumable chunks. And there’s a lot of reasons why it. Think of like social media, right? We’re all hooked on short videos, short things, short attention spans.

And so the idea that someone could jump into a mini course, knock out five or six lessons real quick and say, oh, I got that done, and go on to the next one. It, there’s an energy, a dopamine hit that comes from doing that, and that’s the science of it. But let’s not forget. We all talk about short form content and then the number one podcast is Joe Rogans with three hour interviews.

Yeah, so people do have an appetite as long as the value is there to go and do long, long form content. I have a client that has, I think, 96 lessons in one course, and they’re selling one course. And I thought she was crazy. ’cause originally it was gonna be four [00:12:00] courses and then a bundle, right? And then she said no, I wanna do all one.

I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna redo all the videos, I’m gonna make everything professional. Da. I thought she was crazy. She’s launched and she, I’m gonna say she’s launching successfully. I’m seeing new clients. I’m seeing people complete the course. ’cause that’s the next obstacle is course completion.

But if we get into brass tacks. She knows her niche, she knows her people. The content is stellar. The videos are awesome. They’re all professionally made, so the media is great. And the overall design of the site the colors they chose, the vibrance they chose, it’s all engaging. And they have a CRM employed that encourages people at multiple stages to get to the next step.

And your question, product creation strategy, what’s the best way to go? It’s whatever suits your audience best. And are you willing to do the work to keep the engagement?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I love that story about your client. I. I call that a like [00:13:00] a signature course. Yeah. And I know people that use Lifter and other LMS tools and they just have one course.

It’s always been just one course, one problem, one solution. It’s pretty comprehensive. It might take six weeks for somebody to complete and they just make it better and better and keep doing it. And that’s cool. And that can actually be a solution for people with. Entrepreneurial A DD, and they start thinking membership library of courses, and they have a hundred courses envisioned in their mind.

The signature course can be a powerful tool, but you’re right, it’s not a one size fits all in terms of curriculum design. It’s whatever your learners, what you can do that your learners are gonna get results with.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah, and it takes us to the next section to talk about what, ’cause we talk about technology and tools, but I think it’s so important to recognize that no matter which course you build three short ones, four short ones versus one big one versus, six of one, half dozen the other.

However you get your content in the pages. You still need to leverage some kind of [00:14:00] interaction tool or mechanism to keep people engaged to the content and convince them to finish what they’ve paid for or invested in. Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: And that’s like the milestones chunking thing. Okay, they want this big result, but first is there like a little win here?

Little win here, and you talking about the dopamine and stuff like that. Ideally every lesson would have would feel like a win. Yeah. And satisfying in some way gratifying.

Kurt Von Ahnan: But that takes you right back to the engagements features with lifter LMS. If you want to give people a badge when they get done the first section or whatever, you can do that, you, hey, you’ve earned a badge.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Yeah. And transitioning to tools, we could probably do a whole episode about this. The biggest mistake I’d say is just over obsessing about the tools and the tech and maybe even falling in love with it. It happened to me. That’s why I’m a software guy now. I love tools. I love messing around with technology and building websites, and people fall in love with it.

They fall in love with automation. [00:15:00] They fall in love with producing videos and things like that. But at the end of the day, a tool is just a tool. And, some of the most successful folks I’ve seen. They’ll often launch the course without an LMS. They’ll just do a PayPal link, do like the six weeks.

We’re just gonna deliver it live on a Zoom call, and then later they turn that into a course. But they’re always focused on getting the students the results first. Then they get the WordPress website, then they get going with the tools and just, I think it’s just a fact of life. Everybody overcomplicates it as a beginner.

And then once you get some time in the trenches, you tend to simplify and really just, get as few tools from as many different companies as you need to. And then just keep it simple and never forget. The goal is not to have a fancy website and automate everything under the sun. It’s to help your learners learn.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Sometimes when I’m working independently with a client. I’ll [00:16:00] actually share stories with them about my experiences working at Suzuki or working at Ducati or working at BRP or one of these larger companies. And they’ll be like, I gotta automate this and I gotta automate that. And they haven’t even sold, they don’t have one paying customer yet and they wanna automate all these things and I have to slow ’em down and say, are you aware of how big?

BRP is, or how big Ducati is or what, you would be amazed at how many manual processes are involved in operating and running that business, right? Think about like even people that wanna change their subscription to their bundle at lifter LMS. It’s not so like this crazy automated thing, it’s like we have people that go, oh, you don’t want this one, you want this one. So many people getting involved in the tech space for maybe the first time have these unrealistic expectations that everything is ai, or everything is automated or everything. Is this odd thing that it’s not.

And then to your point, they get distracted by shiny objects and they think. If they’re gonna have a course, they need to have [00:17:00] community, or they need to have forums, or they need to have discussion groups. And it’s man, if you don’t have a thriving community already of 50 or 75 people on some Facebook page, or active users in your site, or something like that, the chances that you’ll launch a completely cold community to nobody and then have it be successful in three to six months.

Pretty slim. Pretty slim. So you, you’ve really gotta monitor yourself on what you decide to activate.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about sales and your, and marketing as well, which are different things by the way. I often to say, marketing is like getting the lead and sales is actually closing the lead and them becoming a customer.

And by the way. What happens after the sale? IE the delivery of the program is just as important. Some people get a little over obsessed with marketing and sales and making money online, and they almost forget they gotta deliver on the other side of that. But speaking of not automating, I [00:18:00] was on a customer site the other day and I noticed they, they had their, and they’ve been doing it for a long time and are very successful.

Multiple six figures a year, and I saw they still had their cell phone on the contact page. Their cell phone number.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yep. You

Chris Badgett: know, the easiest way to sell something on the internet is to do what we do at Lifter and like jump out from behind the internet and be a human being and talk to people.

Yeah, that’s a pro tip. But marketing and sales, I would just say at a high level you have to do it. There’s three types of marketing. There’s content marketing which is just pick one, blog, YouTube podcast. Pick one of those three if you’re gonna do the content marketing route. The other thing you can do is relationships where you leverage other people’s.

Audience. So if you’re an expert in something but you don’t have an audience, but there’s somebody else who does go speak on their podcast, do a webinar for their audience, like leverage other people’s audiences. Ask your existing [00:19:00] customers for referrals, like work the human relationships. The third is outbound, which is not used very often, but is underused in my opinion.

If you’re clear on who your ideal learner is. People are easy to find on the internet. If you’re very specific, if you help chiropractors as an example, you can find chiropractors on the, you can find how to contact ’em, you can find their websites. If you help real estate agents, you can find them on the internet and all kinds, link into

Kurt Von Ahnan: the rescue

Chris Badgett: and just reach out to ’em, give ’em a free resource and let ’em know if they wanna learn more about your program.

That’s prospecting. And then the fourth is paid advertising. Which people get in their head, oh, I just wanna put a dollar in and have $2 come out. But in my experience, paid advertising is the last thing you should do. It’s more of a scaling strategy. Once you already have some more organic in the streets, like getting leads and closing sales.

Once you figure [00:20:00] that part out, then you can scale with ads. But I definitely recommend not starting with it.

Kurt Von Ahnan: I have always been amazed at people that are too shy, too prideful maybe is the word, to share what they’ve done with their inner circle.

So if you build a website and you come out with this really cool course and you don’t have 10 friends that you can put in that course.

Maybe five of ’em for free, but five, that’ll pay you for it, right? If you don’t have five people that say, oh yeah, I’ll take that course for me. That sounds cool. Then are you really secure with what you’ve built? You know what I mean? If you’re expecting the strangers on the internet to make you six figures a year off this product how come people that you know won’t buy it?

How come you won’t share it with people, and that’s where I’m very cognizant, like there’s some projects where I’ve put stuff out and then I realize, oh, it’s not as successful as I hoped it would be. And I [00:21:00] say wait a minute, who in my inner circles even knows that I’ve put this out?

And then I reach out to people, go, Hey, I don’t know if you know this or not, but I released a course on this, or I published this book last year. And people are like, oh crap. I didn’t know you published a book. Yeah. Do you want a copy of it? And then it’s amazing, right? You can get a, you can get an ebook right off the website for five bucks.

So do you want it or not? And then people will sign up and take it.

Chris Badgett: Excellent point. Another part of getting students and having them refer you is for them to actually be successful and tell their friends. Yeah. So in terms of guaranteeing results, or at least increasing the odds or the success rate the biggest mistake I see is that people just literally have no plan.

They think it’s just passive income, sit on the beach. Let the sales roll in a hundred percent completion rates and everything’s just gonna happen magically. But one of the [00:22:00] most overlooked things that the successful people figure out, I call it designing a support mechanism, and you can have multiple kinds of it.

I think of it. We actually have a chart of this on the the course plan challenge, which is on the sidebar of the LMS Cast podcast and on the blog sidebar as well. But it’s basically, there’s two lines. There’s the group in private and then the asynchronous and synchronous. And asynchronous means the support happens not in real time.

Synchronous means support happens in real time. So I’m just gonna lay out a menu of nine support mechanisms you could add and just pick the ones that resonate with you. ’cause you don’t have to do all these. You could do group coaching calls. We do that a lot at lifter LMS peer Masterminds. You can connect students with each other in little groups.

You can actually host a live event. Like you said, your course was [00:23:00] mixed and you had a in-person practicum. If you’re teaching mechanics, it’s really nice to actually be there and get your hands on tools and machines, right? Not just watching video

Kurt Von Ahnan: action.

Chris Badgett: And then you can do so a social learning group on your website or somewhere else.

You can do peer review where students review each other’s stuff. You can turn on comments on your lessons and let people ask for help and read past requests for help. You can do private coaching calls. This is where you can up the price of your program if you’re giving one-on-one time. An in-person VIP day is extreme, but some people do it.

That’s where they, this is like a high ticket course where you fly. A plane to the client or they fly to your office and they get like the white glove personal in-person experience. You can do a red phone service where you can, they can call you when they have challenges. You can do email support that’s [00:24:00] totally overlooked.

Easy to do. You can do private website content like with lifter, LMS private areas to, have a place for private one-on-one support on the website. I. And then I also see a lot of creators these days doing text-based support. So they’ll they’ll give unlimited texting. My wife’s a running coach and she gets texts from her clients with questions.

And sometimes you people do like group text threads with I forget the names of those tools. There’s some community one. Which one? One’s called community. That’s what Gary Vaynerchuk uses. Yeah. There’s. And telegram. I think that’s the one I was thinking of. But yeah, so like I just rattled off nine ways to support your people in addition to like lesson content, videos and PDFs and stuff.

’cause not all humans are exactly the same. So part of holding space for your clients or your learners, just a physical classroom has walls and the teacher’s there to help you. You can do that in the online world as [00:25:00] well.

Kurt Von Ahnan: And I think. Even if it sounds a tad negative, I think it’s really important to, to recognize if you create a course and you invite people to pay you to take your course, there is a certain responsibility to make sure they find success in finishing the course.

If they paid via Stripe and they want to file I want my money back chances are they’re gonna win their money back, right? I didn’t complete the course, I didn’t this, I didn’t, that I didn’t get value from it. And Stripe says, here’s your money back. But if you have. Success mechanisms in place, the request doesn’t even happen, right?

And so getting people to finish and getting people’s positive results documented is super, super important for the ongoing success of your environment.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about continuous improvement, persistence, and iteration. This is definitely if I had to pick three. Things that all the people that I see that are super successful with lifter LMS, [00:26:00] they all take forward and perfect action. They continuously improve. They still have imposter syndrome just like everybody else.

I. But they’re constantly like refining and learning. Like a lot of people who wanna teach are also above average, like curious learning type people.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So you have to use that. And that’s what entrepreneurship is. It’s really just error correction. You’re constantly like optimizing and fixing errors and claiming opportunities and continuous improvement.

What does that look like for a course creator? If you do a signature course after two years, burn it down and redo it from scratch. We’ve redone the lifter LMS Quickstart course on our academy three times, maybe four. And that’s because times have changed. We know what people need even better than we ever have.

The tools have changed. The times have changed. So we redo it, we [00:27:00] continuously improve it. Yeah. And that’s just important.

Kurt Von Ahnan: I was just thinking, I just moved a lot of our motorcycle dealership training over to a new platform, working with a business partner, and one of the things that occurred through that process was what areas of learning in the course.

Didn’t fully hit. ’cause we follow up with live sessions and we end up having a lot of discussion. And so I had to think of where are the possible gaps at? And then I worked really hard to create additional assignments or quizzes to go into really drive home the learning material. And but that’s a delicate balance because you’re like, you don’t wanna give people too much to do where it becomes overly burdensome, but you also wanna make sure that the learning points get, action to them, right? And so I went over it with my partner in the project and we added a lot of assignments and quizzes to it, and we’re getting better results. But that comes with, you have to be willing to experiment and look at the [00:28:00] results and then make the acknowledgement of, did this go the direction I wanted or do I need to curve it back a little bit?

But you can change it as you need as you go.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And going back to our previous point about, getting some live time with your students, whether by email or Zoom or whatever in person, you need to have a feedback loop. ’cause if you’re not hearing from them, you’re just guessing. But when they’re like there and raising their hand Hey, I’m struggling with this part, then you know what?

You have to improve and you can take some responsibility to do that. This is one you know a lot about, which is business to business or business to customer B2C versus B2B. So selling a course or coaching program to one person versus to a group of people. I think the big mistake here is that I think it was somebody like Les Brown who would say that the problem is that you’re just, your dreams are too small.

Like you’re aiming too low. But if you really expand your mind. If you could [00:29:00] sell your courses to a company, and let’s say it’s a, if you sold your course like to a Fortune 500 company that like all their employees needed it, you just have one customer, that big company and you’re done, you’re super successful, right?

Yep. And that’s a, that’s a dream to do that. But that’s why we built Lifter LMS groups because people kept they’re like, I need to be able to, offer this training at scale, and the company needs to see the progress and the reporting on the students and so on. But my advice here is to think of a world where you do both, like you sell to individuals, but you also have a way to get into groups like.

I believe Angela Brown might do that where she’s has training for individual house cleaner entrepreneurs, but also for house cleaning companies that have lots of house cleaners and maids within the organization. So think big like that. And it [00:30:00] might not be a company, it could be a school, it could be like a nonprofit group.

It could be a hospital or some kind of public works thing. And maybe you have a course for like the individual, but then you have a different one for the company. But just think big and just know that option is floating out there.

Kurt Von Ahnan: That opens up other avenues, right? So just because something doesn’t look like it’ll do it out of the box. Don’t make the crazy assumption that you’re outta luck. So in a B2B world, maybe you do make an agreement with. A university or some kind of company that’s doing continuing educational credits and you go, oh, I don’t know how to manage that through Lifter, so I’m just gonna pass, this would be a great opportunity if my software would, and then not ask, because we have a ton of people doing continuing education credits through Lifter LMS.

We have, we, we’ve got custom fields. You can add licensing to the [00:31:00] certificates. You can do expires a year from this issue date. You can do recertification. With cohorts. There’s a ton of opportunities within the platform that when you first see the platform, you might make an assumption you don’t have the capability to do.

Don’t think small just ’cause you think you have to think small. There are all kinds of ways to do things. I personally, I really get a kick out of the, the idea of do I want to sell to one or do I want to sell to many? I love the example of selling to many. I love the idea of, let’s say I wanna sell the course for a hundred dollars a person, and then 10 people wanna buy the course through a group.

That’s a thousand dollars. I’ll make ’em a deal. You can buy it for $900, right? They save a hundred bucks and then you think did I lose a hundred dollars or did I just gain $800? Because it’s one transaction. So for me, I’ll do one to many all day long. I just think it simplifies the process [00:32:00] immensely.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I want to give people an analogy. If you think about books. Courses are like a modern version of books. And where have you done books in a group before, like in a classroom, like a course can be like a virtual textbook. We have lifter, LMS users who sell their course to professors at different universities that have like however many students per class.

And it’s not the whole semester, it’s just like one part of that professor’s like curriculum for the year. Is this online course? Or you could think about a book club. Imagine a bunch of women who just had a baby and they’re like, oh, let’s, and they’re in a group with the new kids and stuff, and they’re like, oh, let’s, postpartum yoga thing.

And then they take this course together and then they do it at home. They do it in the group. Like people read books in groups all over the place. [00:33:00] Think about that for.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Courses when I worked at Ducati, the CEO of Ducati put the, a copy of Strength Finders on everybody’s desk.

And just expected everybody to magically read it, ’cause the book showed up on our desks.

The same thing very much happens with a course. Sometimes the CEO sees something, they like, boom. They buy it for 80 or a hundred people and everyone gets access to it. And Lifter makes it really easy to make that kind of transaction very actionable.

Chris Badgett: Sometimes by the way, people have knowledge and skills that may not be the most exciting thing, like workplace safety, osha, whatever.

But if you’re in those safety niches, I see a lot of people signing up for lifter in safety niches in various industries, and they’re doing this at scale. So let’s, a course is cool, but let’s talk about coaching and having a community. For both as a creator, but also [00:34:00] when we’re designing our program, and I think for course creators adding at least some element of coaching, it allows you to charge more.

You’re gonna get better results. You’re gonna have that feedback loop open, so you’re gonna learn where you need to improve or what’s working well, what people like, what they don’t like, where the gaps are. And the easiest way to do that, my pro tip is to do in office hours. We started doing office hours at lifter LMS and people started coming and we’ve been doing it for seven years or something like that.

But imagine just doing one one hour time box call once a month that accompanies your course. And PE people can show up in a group. And you don’t even have to prepare If it’s like a ask me anything, open office hours. Yeah. You’re basically just creating the digital version of like office hours a teacher might have at a university or something like that.

And it can add a lot of [00:35:00] value. And then I would just say as an entrepreneur it’s good to surround yourself with other people doing this whole crazy thing of figuring out online business and. Creating information products and coaching programs. So join the communities out there and we’ve really focused on that at Lifter to provide some community as aspects.

We have a large Facebook group, a Slack community office hours for our top customers. Ask me anything for people that have questions as they’re new and getting into it and trying to figure things out. But don’t do it alone. Both as an entrepreneur and also don’t expect your students to do it alone.

I remember one of our first lifter, LMS customers said his students felt they said they felt like they were in a ghost town. And that really resonated with me. Like especially if you come in, you’re really excited. It is nice to be on a journey with some other people. We were a part of Dan Martel’s SaaS Academy and it was cool to be [00:36:00] in that community of like software entrepreneurs.

It’s not just. The value wasn’t just Dan delivering coaching and trainings, it was the whole community aspect of it all.

Kurt Von Ahnan: When I did live workshops, I actually thought the best part about the live workshop was the interaction between I. The attendees not me, right? I’ve always and that’s not imposter syndrome.

This is just being very real. I always felt like my role was to be the best facilitator to, to extract the information from the attendees and get them to share with each other rather than put the spotlight on me and just give like a lecture. And so I’ve always liked that type of training. And I once, once you get that nailed, the engagement goes through the roof.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. Once when community done well, it’s a, there’s a saying that people come for the content, but they stay for the community. Yeah, that’s really true. I’ve experienced that as a client before. [00:37:00] It’s community is super valuable and it’s becoming even more and important in a online AI kind of world, like community matters.

So let’s close out. Talking about this is definitely something I see with the successful course creators and coaches and education entrepreneurs and people building LMS sites for clients, which is personal discipline and habits. I think about it like this, a lot of people. Have a dream to write a book.

And I’m in this camp. I have written a book that is 95% done and I have not finished. But that’s because I’m really busy with lifter LMS. He is finished. See if you’re listening, Kurt is holding up one of his many published books. But to be an entrepreneur, to be a content creator, to be a, invested person trying to help your clients. You gotta have habits and [00:38:00] discipline for me personally I’m a, I know there’s these two ends of the spectrum. Some people love planning and all this, and other people like to be more improvisational. I happen to be on the scheduling end. I’m not saying that’s better.

But the improvisational end is also good and you can build discipline and habits around that as well. For me, time boxing is really important. I use the calendar heavily to make sure I’m touching the various parts of what I do and content I need to make. And even just administrative stuff that I need to do.

For example, today there’s a block of time on my calendar where I run payroll every other Thursday. Like it’s just, it happens. If I didn’t have that on the calendar, like I’m, it just creates mental overhead. I don’t need to deal with oh wait a second, is today payday or whatever. And I have like content creation time blocks.

I have other blocks for getting into various high priority projects and things [00:39:00] like that. But at the end of the day, I think the discipline comes from just having a strong why and believing in what you want to do and then and also taking care of your health. I think burnout is an extreme problem and entrepreneurship and it’s very easy to burn out.

I’ve been there. You’ve probably been there, Kurt, you out there listening has probably been there before. And just because you burned out, it doesn’t mean it’s over. It just means you let your discipline, your habits, and your health get away from you. And those are things that you can, you can’t flick a switch and have amazing habits, discipline and health, but you can work on it and be on a upward spiral instead of a downward spiral, or at least try to stabilize where you are.

And I. Spending time, just getting outside and being with your family and also doing all the business stuff you need to do it’s important to do it all.[00:40:00]

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yes. I don’t, I’m not sure how else to respond to that other than to say yes. For me it’s physical activity. Yeah. If I feel locked into a locked in or unproductive, or writer’s block or however you describe that unproductive feeling when you’re working. For me it’s physical activity. Get out, do a short bike ride, take the dog for a walk, something, come back, reset, and and get back to it.

But those. Those daily habits are super important. Like I, I still use a digital calendar. I still have people can set appointments with me through an appointment setting link, and it puts it on a Google calendar, which shares it to my Outlook calendar, which gives me notifications in my phone and all of that.

But my daily routine is I get up. I do my daily reading a little bit of prayer time, and then I review that digital calendar and I actually write it down in my digital tablet. [00:41:00] And the act of writing it down is what solidifies my expectations for the day, and then I just make sure that I hit those days marks.

What I mean and people can’t schedule an appointment with me more than less than 24 hours in advance. So I know that I don’t have any incoming appointments for that same day. So I’m able to really monitor and manage my calendar well that way.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s an awesome, and I read a book, it’s an old book, but it’s a classic called Getting Things Done by David Allen from a productivity standpoint, and that was written before digital.

The book’s probably been updated to be more digital, but. The concepts in there are super powerful. So I definitely recommend reading the book getting things done. And what’s the Big Habits book by James Clear? I was thinking of the Seven Effective

Kurt Von Ahnan: Habits of Successful People, or whatever

Chris Badgett: that is.

That’s also good. That’s also good. I’m gonna get that book real quick here. ’cause Habits Serve You, atomic [00:42:00] Habits is James Clear’s book. I. Habits are just like a superpower. And I don’t think people realize, or they underestimate how much mental load and stress you take away by letting the habit or the calendar block hold that space for you so you’re not running around like a Yeah, with a monkey mind of chaos in your head and feeling overwhelmed.

And the last thing I’ll say on that is. To go easy on yourself. I call it calendar integrity. So I’m really scheduled person ’cause I’m trying to, I’m juggling a million things and sometimes I miss something on my calendar or something else expands over something else. But I don’t beat myself up. As long as I’m like hitting at about 80% calendar integrity, I’m good.

And if I fall off or if it’s worse, I just try to get it back to AD and I’m not too hard on myself. So just because you may have some setbacks. It does take time to build that, but then once you can count on your systems [00:43:00] and your routines, habits and tools, the stress goes way down.

Yeah. And that comes later in the journey. It takes a while to learn those lessons. I think it does. It does. This has been a great discussion, Kurt. I appreciate it. I wanted to get together with you ’cause we’ve been doing this for a long time and I know we’ve seen patterns just over a decade plus in our own lives and also in, the tens of thousands, of course creators we’ve come across and interact with.

So we want to share some top, success patterns and patterns that don’t always work out and to watch out for. But thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Is there anywhere. You’d like people to connect with you.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Just two, two main things. Anything that’s business related for me is gonna be on Ana Nomas.

So Ana Nomas on x on Facebook our own website, ana nomas.com. And if you wanna make that personal [00:44:00] connection I really hold that up to my LinkedIn account ’cause I’m the only Kurt Van Onan on LinkedIn. So when you find me, you know you got the right guy, hit connect and and we’ll see what we have in store for each other.

You’re muted.

Chris Badgett: Thank you. Thanks for coming on, Kurt. Go connect with Kurt. He is an awesome guy to have in your corner. You can find me over at lifter LMS and on Twitter. For this episode, I wish you all the best success building your online education company. Reach out to us if there’s anything we can do to help join our communities and we will catch you in the next show.

Take care.

I.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter [00:45:00] lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.