How to Start an Online Coaching and Course Business in 2023 with Pua Pakele

​In this LMScast episode, Pua Pakele shares her experience about online coaching and course business in 2023.

She had previously worked as a consultant in the corporate productivity sector due to her engagement with a podcast on health and productivity, but she soon realized that she wanted to help entrepreneurs who were passionate about what they did but feeling overburdened.

After having a poor experience with a web developer and a $8,000 website they couldn’t manage, Pua decided to enter the field of course development and web design.

She made the decision to learn web design on her own, comparing it to online interior design. She developed a fondness for the course developer community while working exclusively with coaches and admired its driven and brilliant people.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: 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 Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Pua Pakele, and she’s from Rebel Media. That’s RBL media.co. She’s an expert at course Creation marketing, helping people build brands. I’m really excited to get into it with you today. Pua, welcome to the show.

Pua Pakele: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Chris,

Chris Badgett: tell us how you got into this whole world. ’cause it’s an interesting world to find yourself in a niche of course creation. And I know you’ve done a lot with Kajabi and marketing and branding, like how did this all happen?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, it, it’s a really interesting niche and I, I, it almost happened by accident and in fact it did happen by accident.

 I had a business previously with a business partner, and we started that business as a podcast actually, and it was just a podcast and it was us just talking about nothing and everything, and it was just literally two friends who worked at a gym. And the whole reason we started it in the first place was.

We were doing a lot of research for our clients who were following the prescription that we gave them, right? Come to class five times a week, you know, eat more protein, eat less carbs like it was. It’s, it’s somewhat outdated advice at this point, but back then it, it seemed like it should work, and it didn’t, it didn’t work for everybody.

So people would say I’m really frustrated because I’m, I’m coming to class every day. I feel better, but the results that I’m looking for are not happening. And so we did a lot of just research around like sleep quality and how that affects your health and your stress levels, and. Do you even wanna be your high school weight?

Is that even healthy? Right? All of these things that we didn’t necessarily feel like we had a script for in the gym. And so we were like, let’s do a podcast so we can talk about all the stuff we’re learning. So we got really into the health, wellness, and productivity space. Like how do you create more time to actually do the things that are going to benefit your health, sleep, enjoy time with your family, get to the gym, prepare healthy meals, and we started to get.

 Contacted by organizations here saying, you know, could you come in and do like a, a lunch and learn, or a half day workshop or a weekend? And we got into the corporate productivity space and we did consulting in that world for a little while and realized, oh my gosh, I don’t wanna help people who hate their jobs.

To work more and get more done like that just didn’t feel good. So we shifted to supporting entrepreneurs who had the exact opposite problem. They love what they do and they work way too much. And so the productivity space then was helping them to be more efficient so that they could step away. And in that long explanation, the way that I got into the course creation space, in the web design space was when we started our podcast, we hired somebody as a referral to build a website for us.

It cost us $8,000. We had all these things that we wanted, and we got none of them. And we had a site that we were essentially locked out of. We couldn’t make any changes and they disappeared. So we’re out eight K. We’re a brand new startup and we have a website that we hate that we can’t do anything with.

And I was like, screw this. No one deserves this. I had dabbled in web design in previous jobs, and so I was like, you know what? I’m just gonna learn this. And this was, maybe, this was almost 10 years ago at this point, so I’m completely self-taught and I just figured it out and I loved it. Like web design is it’s like interior design online.

And so now I get to build people’s digital storefronts and digital spaces and allow it to feel like a really exciting, aligned experience. And so that’s how I got started and why I provide the service in the way that I do. I always wanna teach people how to make updates if they want to, if they don’t want to.

I’m always here. I never want anyone getting stuck. And the reason why I’m in the course creation space is through that business that I had with a business partner. We worked primarily with coaches, so they were all looking to scale their business without having to do more one-on-one coaching. So they were in doing group programs, they were doing courses, and I just fell in love with the course creator.

Space in general. I think it’s brilliant. I think the people who do courses are really interesting and smart and motivated. And yeah, I just think it’s a fun place to be.

Chris Badgett: I love that story. And I particularly like what you said about kind of the pivot to working to, with people that love their work versus, you know, hate their job.

And I never really thought about it that in that way, but a friend of mine once said, and another podcast name is Dane Maxwell. He said that I. You know, you don’t wanna serve everybody. Like even if you want to help everybody, you really don’t and you can’t. And like the way you told your story there, I was like, yeah, that makes sense.

Like having clients who hate where they’re at isn’t necessarily fun to work with or doesn’t get you super excited.

Pua Pakele: Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. And it was hard to leave. I don’t mean to cut you off. No, go ahead. It was like when we made the decision to switch our target audience, we were like, God, but people are still contacting us.

They still want and need help. And it was a very difficult thing to switch because we knew that we could help them and we were like, there’s, we had to realize that there are people out there. Who really want to help those groups of people and to let them do that work that they want versus us doing it because we feel guilty.

’cause we know that we can help them, even though we don’t get super excited about it. I, it’s a shift worth making, but it, it was difficult.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you mentioned like getting in with the coaches. Are these like health and fitness coaches or business coaches or life life coaches, or how did, how did you find yourself within coaches?

And if there’s somebody else out there who’s trying to, you know, work with clients in the coaching industry, how do they, what advice do you have for them?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, I mean, the answer’s yes. All types of coaches typically, and this was about. I would say six years ago-ish at this point where the online coaching industry, so specifically like business and life coaches, was becoming very, very popular.

And it was like the wild, wild west where people would hear that coaching is kind of an interesting, lucrative industry and everyone was trying to get a little piece of it. And so there, there was also a lot of. Information out there about how to scale coaching businesses. And so that’s, I think, part of where we were able to step in and say okay, if you Google this or go on YouTube and look for how to scale your coaching business, you’re gonna get all of this data.

Here’s what we’ve seen work for, you know, a handful of clients, what we believe could work for you. So it, it was like a good time to get into that space as well. Coaches in general sort of start their business because kind of the same as everybody else. They find themselves in having a specific set of expertise that they can teach, and a lot of traditional coaching was done one-on-one.

They just, you know, jumped on a Zoom call, went to lunch. It was like, you know, essentially. I’m gonna get reamed for saying this, but it was almost like therapy where you have a therapist and you see them individually. Right. And to move from that into group coaching or into courses felt like a reduction in the quality of service.

 And which is not true at all. So it was also teaching them the mindset around allowing you to serve more people. Where they’re at, right. Sometimes people can’t afford one-on-one. Sometimes they don’t necessarily get the best experience out of one-on-one, and they prefer having a cohort or a group or an asynchronous learning platform where they can just go through the material at their own time.

If they’re like really busy, maybe they have young kids. So there was a lot of training just around the. Potential and the capacity that online courses and group coaching could offer to people who were just doing only one-on-one coaching, and it could have been anybody, fitness coaches, life coaches, business coaches, and the fitness coaches really, really joined the game in 2020.

When they were used to doing personal training or even group fitness at a location, then they couldn’t be there anymore. So when Covid hit, that’s when a lot of the fitness coaches joined this industry.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, that’s cool. Now, if you could wave a magic wand, you know, you, you help with websites, online courses, logos, branding, marketing.

 You mentioned sometimes people start with a doing one-on-one and then we gotta figure out group coaching and then maybe package it into a course. If you could put all those things in a certain order of there’s some, a fresh fitness expert who wants to do a, you know, a kettlebell thing online, what, what order would you advise them to kinda, if you were to lay out the blueprint of where they might travel over the course of a year, what would that look like?

Pua Pakele: Ooh, I love this question. So I talk a lot about creating an ecosystem because essentially what you wanna do is attract your ideal target audience, the people who you think that you could serve best, and provide each person an entry point to your business. Some people are only gonna consume the free stuff.

So have have some good free stuff. There’s a online programming, like a CrossFit program called Street Parking, and it’s they, if you pay for their membership, they give you like daily daily workouts. They have an online community. They have meetups. It’s really cool. And before you become a member, they have all of these ways for you to try their stuff.

They have Instagram where they post random workouts. They have a podcast, they have, I think it’s a set like a week of workouts. That’s just a sample week that you would get if you paid. So it’s, you know, all of the different modifications, everything that you’d get, it never changes. So that free week is always there.

And then you’re like, okay, I think I like this. I think I wanna give it a try. I’m gonna jump in at the monthly because I’m not sure if I wanna do it long term. Then you can upgrade to annual. You could do, I don’t know if they have one-on-one coaching, but they have an upgrade to like a nutrition program.

So they have all of these stepping stones for you to enter at wherever you think that you need to be. Some people know already, they either were referred or they’ve been following you for a while and they’re like, give me the biggest and best thing that you have, right? And so having an option for people to opt in at the top as well is really important.

 But to go back to your question, I would say start with what you have and figure out what the challenges are for you. And that will dictate the next step. So for many coaches, what they already have is a one-to-one setup, and their challenge is they’re, they’re maxed out. They cannot bring on even one more one-on-one person.

So they have a wait list. You could either keep that wait list and nurture that wait list and just wait for a space to open, or the logical next step for that would be to create a group program. The difference between creating a group program and an asynchronous course. Is it’s like this big, it’s just the live component, right?

So the easiest way to go from group program to online course creation is to record the content that you’re teaching to the group and build it into a course that does not have that live component. I would say if you do that, be mindful of the sharing that comes in from the group. So some people, you know, if a group program.

Is a safe space for people to share. You have a, a community that feels comfortable with each other and they’re sharing things that they may not want, you know, Joe Schmo course student to see. Consider editing, consider having people sign some sort of consent form or waiver. But you could essentially create them both almost at the same time.

So I would say for coaches, decide what? Your goal is, and if you think that you are just not even able to do a group thing, you don’t wanna commit to that, that regular engagement, whether it’s weekly calls, monthly calls and you’re like, I just wanna do the course, get it out there, and just have course and one-on-one and I’ll do group later.

Totally fine. The thing about creating course content is it will add more work to your plate before it takes it away. So just be ready for that temporary increase in time and energy that you’re gonna spend creating the course content, knowing that it is temporary if you finish the course, which is like so many people start courses and they don’t finish creating them because of that.

So I would say just plan. Well have a, have a good schedule in place and just commit to finishing it.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. What, with all your experience and time in the coaching industry, what do you see? And we all want our clients to be successful with their courses and their coaching programs. Marketing always comes on the table.

 What do you see working for coaches these days in terms of generating leads and you know, a steady flow of leads that doesn’t cause them to burn out so that their business can, you know, survive and thrive.

Pua Pakele: Yeah, great question. And this is something that comes up. I mean, I’m guilty of having something to promote and not, and having like cold audiences that I’m promoting it to, and I’m like, oh, that’s why there’s no action.

 You know, it can feel nurturing. Your audience can feel like it’s unimportant. Until you need the audience and they’re not there. So most importantly, it’s create time. Ideally every day, like 30 minutes. Every day, every week at bare minimum, once a month, send an email newsletter like I. That should be the least that you do.

 But having an audience that is used to who you are, because as a coach, people aren’t just buying into the information that you’re delivering. You can get that anywhere. They’re buying into your teaching style, your energy, the way that they resonate or don’t resonate with you. And I think that’s equally as important and not talked about enough.

Give people a chance to get to know you and decide whether or not they like you. If they don’t like you, give them the opportunity to get out. Unsubscribe, don’t buy you. Do not wanna sell to everybody. ’cause that’s when you get really, really unhappy Clients, really stressful situations, refund requests.

We want that filter. We do not want everybody to buy our stuff. Unless it’s like everybody can buy a water bottle. If you sell water bottles, go ahead market to every human on the planet. But if you have a coaching program, you want the people who already know that they, they like you and they trust that you can provide whatever solution or transformation it is that you promise.

I love that.

Chris Badgett: There’s a quote, I give him credit, but I don’t know where it comes from. Which is your vibe. Attract your tribe. Yes. And I, I love that one. ’cause it gives you permission to just hey, just, just be you and the people that show up at your door are going to be good people to work with for you.

Pua Pakele: Absolutely. I think I didn’t answer your marketing question ’cause I got. Distracted by that. That’s, that’s

Chris Badgett: part of it is your vi your bu show up, send newsletters like you need to build an audience. So tell us more about how to build an audience, especially if we’re starting at zero.

Pua Pakele: Yeah.

Great question. So again, this sort of comes back down to the ecosystem and the best way to build an audience is to provide something of value. At this point, if you’re listening to this, you probably have heard of offering a freebie on your website. And as a course creator, having your freebie be a mini course is like I.

That, that to me is the pinnacle freebie opt-in because people are gonna see the inside experience of working with you before they actually buy. And it doesn’t take very long to put a mini course together. It’s, and you could even repurpose some of your actual course content. But it allows people to experience you in video form, right?

Do they like the sound of your voice? Because that’s really important. And do they appreciate the user experience that you’re providing? So the other part of this is making sure that that experience in your mini course is also the same or a similar experience that they’re gonna get in your paid.

Programs. So don’t put all of your effort into your mini course. Make it this amazing thing. And then they get into your paid course and it’s, it’s a letdown ’cause then you’re, they’re, yeah.

Chris Badgett: Anyway so that to me is, can you give a can you give a like a mini course? Like just flesh it out a little bit.

What would one look like? How long would it be? Yeah. And that kind of stuff.

Pua Pakele: Great question. So you, the goal is to provide a mini. Result or a mini transformation because if somebody can get a little taste of the solution that you offer, they’re gonna want more. So for the like fitness coach example, you could give a, I’ve seen like a five day sugar detox where you have them take measurements at the beginning of the mini course.

Then maybe it’s a three to five video course, and every video is a. About five minutes and you’re just talking them through, maybe you know what to expect when they’re detoxing from sugar and maybe your weight will go up before it goes back down. So don’t weigh yourself every day. Just you are providing your expertise and your personality in these little clips.

 And if you really wanna go above and beyond, you’re also gonna do like a, a worksheet or a download to go with the mini course. And then, you know, it gives them something tangible to say, oh my gosh, this was free. I did it in a week. I lost two pounds. Epic. What else do you got for me? Right? So I’d say focus on the mini transformation and don’t give everything away in your mini course.

I love that.

Chris Badgett: What else? What else? In terms of growing our community and filling our ecosystem with happy folks.

Pua Pakele: Yeah, providing value in something like a download, a worksheet, a checklist, and another strategy that is I would say it’s kind of losing steam at this point. And I don’t know if it’s outdated, microphone is slipping or if it’s.

Changing platforms, but what used to be really popular and actually really effective was like a Facebook group or some sort of online community that was free. Free community. So many coaches. Yeah. Free community. And you talk about it everywhere you, that’s your call to action on your social media, your podcast.

Here’s the link. Join my community. Join a group of like-minded entrepreneurs who are also creating courses. The challenge with that is you gotta show up there going live on Facebook, posting questions, answering questions, being there, allowing them again to get to know who you are. And that can be a little bit of a heavy lift, and I think Facebook groups are somewhat dying out.

 And it, it’s a lot to do with the algorithm. Like you can have a thousand people in a group and three people will see your post. So it is it, yeah, I see people doing it in Slack now. I see it in Discord. And you know, you could do workshops, like free monthly workshops to teach a little morsel of whatever it is that you offer.

 So there’s a lot of ways to nurture audiences in an organic way. So not paying for advertising, which is another can of worms, totally legitimate. Involves a little bit of a investment and time. ’cause you have to spend time to test the ads and create the ads and adjust the ads and dial ’em in and all the, all those different ways.

So yeah, lots of options.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, let’s put our instructional design hat on and if we’re gonna actually design a course and you know, figure out what the course outline is. Do you have any tips for that? And I guess the same thing would hold true is what’s your process for a group coaching process?

Like, how do you, how does, how does an expert organize what they’re trying to teach into something coherent that the, their target audience will love?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, great question. I’m gonna do the course design first and then mm-hmm. Tackle the, the group coaching. So I like to look at course design as entertainment, and I don’t mean to diminish the, the actual information that you’re teaching, but the idea behind information delivery is to actually allow it to be consumed and to get people coming back for more.

So I like to teach, like creating your course content in sort of a story arc where you kind of get them hooked. You give them a little, just like your mini course, you’re gonna give them little quick wins along the way so that they wanna come back for more, so that they are almost like healthily addicted to your course.

Is is the goal, like Netflix, right? If you just binge watch a series, it’s because right where that episode ended. You can’t not keep watching. So that’s the idea behind the course and thinking about what your transformation is at the end. And working backwards from that is also a great place to start.

 Because you’re going to wanna lay, it’s, it’s very complex. I’m trying to like, figure out how to answer this in a, in a quick and succinct way. But I would say first and foremost, always think about that, that hook and creating a little bit of entertainment value in that story arc as you’re creating your content.

 But from an actual information delivery standpoint, you wanna start to train you clients to almost like you. You’re creating almost like this little cool club. So you’re gonna use create language for yourself and teach it in the first few modules. Allow people to understand the bigger concepts by teaching them in bite-sized chunks early on.

 For example, if you’re a realtor and you wanna teach people how to buy their first home, You’re gonna wanna define language that all realtors are using in that space, but also creating little like easy to remember maybe acronyms or language that is unique to what you are teaching. Because then it becomes this like space where you know if you know, you know, and people like that.

So there’s, those are just like little tips to get people coming back. Invested in you and setting yourself apart from all of the other people who are trying to teach the exact same thing. Does that help?

Chris Badgett: That does help. That’s awesome. Can you tell us the client’s story about I’m on Rebel media.co, that’s rbl media.co.

And I see all these wonderful faces. Tell us a story about one of your clients. Give it, entertain us with, with a ooh, a story about what they did or, or what working with you and what, what they accomplished with their, their website and their business.

Pua Pakele: Yeah, so I am gonna, I wanna, I’m going around media.co right now too, because I wanna make sure that this person is actually on there so you guys can all check them out.

They’re a newer. Oh, I need to add them. Okay, I’ll tell you about ’em anyway. Okay. ’cause this is a course that is coming soon and the website is go kindling.com and they created an incredible product. It’s a, it’s a course for young adults. To teach them essentially all the things that we didn’t learn in school.

And this program was created with a group of 12 young adults. I think they were aged maybe 18 or 19 to their mid twenties. And all different backgrounds, different fields of study, different aspirations, career goals demographics, and they. They went through all of the course curriculum together, filming in like a warehouse, and it was, it was really, really cool to be a part of the creation of their digital space, their marketing materials, and the course platform itself, because we could take the footage that they captured with all of these young adults and create a story around each one.

So not only are you investing in the. Like the information that’s being delivered, but you’re also investing in the storyline of each of these people that allows, you know, so you can go to the website and then about three quarters of the way down the homepage, there’s squares of each of the young adults and it features a video of each of them.

So you see what their interests are, you see their age, and it allows the young adults that this particular company is targeting. To identify with whoever they feel like they resonate with most. Brilliant. I mean, I, I can’t, I don’t take credit for all of this. Like this was definitely collaborative with myself and the client, but I just think it was so smart to be able to offer such a wide range for people to come in and say, I look like you.

I sound like you, I aspire to be what you aspire to be. I feel the same way that you do about networking or interviews or financial stuff. Right? It gives you so many. Like entry points to be able to say, if you can help this person, I feel confident that you can help me. So yeah, I’m stoked for this one.

Chris Badgett: I love that.

Can you say the website again

Pua Pakele: for that one? Go kindling.com. K I N D L I n G.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You also do logos and branding and I came from a background of like direct response marketing, copywriting, that kind of thing. But over time I, I fell in love with branding, like brand drives demand and you know, either there’s debate like, oh, you just need this kind of marketing or that kind of market.

You need All of it is my, in my opinion, but Talk to us about creating great logos and exceptional brands that we love, that attract wonderful people to our, our products and programs.

Pua Pakele: Mm, I love this. So I think branding, strong branding can make your business and your ideal client. It, it can close for you like.

It literally is the thing that can make or break your space, your digital space. And I was gonna say, your business, I don’t think I’m gonna give it that much credit because I think people can override bad, br bad branding, but it definitely matters and it hits on that subconscious trust level that people don’t realize that it’s happening.

And I just experienced this. Myself, I, I rebranded about two months ago. It was about a month ago, and not that my old brand was like horrifically misaligned, but it was definitely a little bit chaotic and just having, you know, three brand colors instead of 10 because I had a gradient in my. My logo, like who does that?

 And you know, having very specific energy and a specific vibe around the content, the copy, the images, all of that came together and people are like, wow, I love your new brand. Even you said it to me. I was like, I’m pretty much using the same stuff. But the brand itself, the energy is more aligned, the actual logo is more aligned.

 And the thing about subconscious. Consumption of like digital content and branding and all of that is people don’t notice when something’s right. And that’s what we want. We want the experience to be something that they experience, like we just want it to be enjoyable. We want them to say okay, I feel like I know you.

I feel like I trust you. I don’t know why, but I do. People will notice when something’s off and they’ll leave, so they’ll say, oh God, that picture’s blurry. Oh, I can, I can barely read their logo, you know? Or who made their logo? Was this made in 1986? You know, it’s just like people will feel the misalignment and they will notice it right away.

We don’t want anyone to notice when the alignment is perfect. We just want them to enjoy. And so having consistent branding is important for that. And if you are ever gonna hire anybody to build or create anything for your business, ever, ever, ever, Giving them a brand guide is gonna save them time and save you money, period.

Tell us about that. You don’t want anybody guessing. Yeah, so anybody that gives me their a brand guide that was created by a professional when they hire us to build their website. They get super aligned colors, they get aligned fonts, they get, you know, logo versions that are created for specific uses menus, dark backgrounds, light backgrounds.

Your brand designer is gonna give you all of this, and it is a roadmap for creating consistency across everything that you have. That consistency is going to be like the biggest trust builder for people who are visiting your site. Cold. If you have a friend and the friend, they know that you do good work and that you deliver on time and blah, blah, blah.

They don’t need to see your branding. It’s the people that don’t know you who need to say, okay, you are consistent. You are predictable. In this case, being predictable is a very, very good thing, right? They wanna be able to say okay. If you can be consistent with all of your stuff across the board, I know that you’ll be consistent with your service, your products.

Again, it’s subconscious. Nobody actually says this stuff, but that’s the game that we’re playing. If you don’t have this, your designers, your service providers, they’re just guessing and they’ll probably guess wrong, and then you’ll say, oh, can you revise this? This doesn’t really feel like me. And they’ll be like, oh, but.

This is what you wanted. And then you’ll say, oh, but the color, I don’t really like that teal. I kind of like a little, like a mint green. If you give them an exact color code, they’ll nail it every time.

Chris Badgett: So is this. Is this something you really recommend people hire to get the the brand guide created?

It’s not something you can create yourself if you very, you’re very unlikely to create it yourself if you’re not a designer.

Pua Pakele: Yeah. It depends. I feel like there’s a lot of resources out there that can guide you, hiring a professional for this can be costly. And I get it. Some people are just starting out.

They don’t, they just don’t have the resources. And I appreciate that, I think that’s, you know, when you’re just starting. You do what you need to do in order to get to where you need to go. And I would say having a brand guide that you’ve created from a template that you found on Google or in Canva that has specific colors and color codes.

A logo of any sort that works on, you know, a dark background, a light background. The colors are aligned. You have a heading font and a body font that you’re going to use for all of your things. Those three things are the minimum that you need to have a brand guide, and having that created by you is better than having nothing.

When you’re ready, upgrade and get it created by a professional because they’ll be able to provide things to you that, you know, vector files that maybe you can’t create on your own without specific software or they can give you like guidelines of how to use the logo, different color options, mockups for apparel or, you know, the list goes on.

And I think. You will know when it’s time to upgrade. You know, you’ll feel like, okay, I really feel like this logo is just not working for me, or I, I feel like my digital space is not quite where I want it. That feeling will start to show up and it won’t go away to the point where you won’t be able to ignore it anymore.

Then, you know, you can, you can reach out to an expert and there are platforms like 99 designs where you have options. I think it’s two or $300 for a logo with, you know, revisions and multiple options. It, you can, there’s, there’s like a bunch of designers that submit their, their logo designs to you and you can ask questions and yeah, so there’s that.

And then you can get a brand guide created for a little bit more money, but it’s not as much as hiring like an, you know, a single designer. So there you have options, but it is so crucial. If you’re gonna have, I would say every business needs one period. I.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. And we, by the way, at LifterLMS hired 99 designs to do our logo when we redid it several years ago.

And it’s great. 300 bucks. Yeah. Yeah.

Pua Pakele: They’re great. And they’re so talented.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about technology. I see a lot of coaches and course creators get a little. Overwhelmed or, or, or over-focused on technology sometimes. And they, they, they’re not spending as much energy on like actually creating the course or building community or whatever.

 If you, if we’re, if you could wave that magic wand and you’re kind of talking to a, a course creator or coach person, what, what are the key technology pieces and what should people be wary of in terms of over-investing or over-indexing in such a good

Pua Pakele: question. This is all you need.

Chris Badgett: For those of you listening, pu just held up her, her iPhone.

I believe so, yeah,

Pua Pakele: that’s it. I mean it’s every, every cell phone at this point can take good enough video to create a course. Yeah. We can dive into the nitty gritty. Like you can get a microphone, you probably actually should get a microphone. And I can talk about what you might wanna use for your phone, but, People spend so much time getting ready to record their course and buying all the stuff that they never

Chris Badgett: actually do it.

The greens green and the Yeah. Right.

Pua Pakele: Yeah. You know, at this point, use everybody’s on Zoom. Use zoom to record it. Blur out your background. If you don’t have a nice background, just get the content out there. My C p A just told me last week, he’s I forget. He was in a program and they said, J L Ss.

The PG version of that is just launch something. Oh, get it out there. Yeah, you can. Yeah. And I, I think it’s so true because we put so much pressure on ourselves to make sure that it’s perfect, that if you buy your $250 Sure. Microphone and your. $300 headphones and you’re make your space all crazy. You get your uplights in the back and your huge lights in the front and whatever, and then your course content sucks and nobody buys it, then what?

Right. It’s so much better to have your content out there helping people. Nobody actually cares, actually. Like if, if I wanna learn how to paint I don’t know, a. I, I don’t know what I shouldn’t have used that. If I wanna paint a tree and I’m buying a, an online course on how to paint a tree, all I want is for somebody to teach me how to paint a tree.

I’m not gonna say, oh man, this person’s audio. You know, we’ll talk about audio in a second, but I’m not focusing so much on the technology that they’re using. I’m focusing on the result that I’ve invested in. With that being said, Audio is kind of important and I would at the very least, recommend like a $20 lavalier mic from Amazon to plug into your phone if that’s what you’re gonna use.

And a tripod phone, lavalier mic tripod.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And just to build on what you were saying, I was in a a five figure a year coaching program for software founders. And I didn’t a lot of the, and there was a ton of content material in there and almost all of that, I listened to, even though there were videos while exercising or doing things around the house or whatever.

So I didn’t even, I couldn’t care less about the quality of the video. It was all about the ideas and learning, getting better, having fun during the process. Yeah, that’s the other thing people, so when I tell people to use their phone, they say, oh, but the video quality’s not good. Most people consume course content on their phone where the video is smaller and that, you know, high definition quality or four K, it doesn’t even matter.

Pua Pakele: And I, to your point, I bought a $15,000 course a few years ago. No, no video at all. It was all audio and they had like subtitles, so for like accessibility, all of the transcripts, all the content was, yeah, transcripted on the screen. But I listened passively. What was way more valuable from that course.

Were the downloads that I used to actually do the work. So I would say put all of your attention into creating good content and good resources like downloads or PDFs or whatever and focus way less on the tech.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Pua tell us about Rebel Media, RBL media.co. What you do and what kind of the ideal person to work with you is yeah, so we just, I say we, it’s me, but I like saying we, ’cause it makes it feel like there’s a whole bunch of us. And there will be. So I recently shifted into what will soon be a digital media agency for course creators. And I did this for all the reasons we talked about today. Before this shift, I was offering web design and online course design for people who I.

Pua Pakele: Basically could come to me with everything put together already, and they just needed it built and beautified. And so I was like, you know, you have to bring your content, you have to bring your copy, you have to bring your branding your course videos, and I will build it all for you. Maybe 50% of the people actually had all of that.

So what I wanted to do is to be able to offer. All of that and more under one roof with people who are aligned with the way that we build, with the sort of concepts that we teach, the mindset. And that includes coaching around creating your content, around creating marketing materials and funnels and even marketing strategy.

 And I hope to soon also social offer, social media strategy, although I don’t have that yet. But yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check out Rebel media.co. Rbl media.co. Any final words for the people pah? Any words of wisdoms or tips for the course creators out there? To the counterintuitive words for the people insight?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, just, just launch something. Yeah. If you’re like, so many people are like, oh, I wanna do an online course, same thing. Oh, I wanna start a podcast. I wanna write a book. Do it and do it. Do it imperfectly like crawl. Get a podcast recorded and I want you to record and release something that in a year from now you will listen to it and you will absolutely cringe.

 That’s where you should be when you’re starting out. Maybe a book you can have like an editor. ’cause you can’t really, yeah, a book. Maybe polish it a little bit more but start writing it, you know? But I think if you look at any creator out there, any YouTube person that you follow, that you think has really, really high quality, great content, spend a little bit of time looking for the first few videos that they released.

And then tell yourself that you can’t also do that too. So just launch something.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And after watching many, many course creators, I’ve noticed that as the, the ones that make it take quick, imperfect action, and they get better over time. It’s a, it’s a long game. Yeah. But perfectionism is the, is the enemy in a, in a lot of ways.

Absolute pua, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate you sharing all your wisdom with us today. And is there anywhere else people can connect with you besides RBL media.co?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, my social media platform of choice is Instagram, so you can follow [email protected] and yeah, shoot me a message. I love connecting with people there.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Pua.

Pua Pakele: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of L M Ss 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 over at LifterLMS. Dot com slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift.

Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.