Now, this episode is a little different to normal – instead of giving an you overview of what I’ve been doing in my business over a couple of weeks, I’m digging RIGHT into one very big thing I did over a couple of months.

Beta testing my new online course.

When most people create an online course or digital product, they create the entire course and then try to sell it.

In many cases, the course isn’t very successful. It might be a good course, but that doesn’t mean that people will buy it.

And it’s because it’s been created without feedback or input.

A beta test is a way of ensuring that you create a course that people actually WANT.

Beta testing has three overall steps

1. Research and plan out the course
2. Presell it, to make sure people will actually pay for it
3. Create it along with your group of testers

Beta testing also provides accountability, because you’ve committed to create the course, to a timeline, for paying customers!

If your beta test goes well, you can be fairly confident that you have a product that will sell well – people have already bought it, and their feedback and input along the way will ensure it’s tailored for your customers.

Plus, you get paid to create, and your testers can provide testimonials and case studies for your brand-new product.

Sounds great? It IS great! That’s why I’ve been doing it since 2017.

Listen in to hear all the details about beta testing – what I did, what went well, and what went wrong.

Listen to the episode right here

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If you enjoy it, please give it a 5⭐ rating and review in Spotify and Apple Podcasts, plus subscribe and like in YouTube – it really does make a difference. Thanks so much!

Resources & ideas mentioned

I mention the following resources & ideas (and goats) in this episode.

Some of these links are affiliate links, meaning I will receive a commission if you purchase via that link (thanks!) – see my disclosure here.

Beta test waitlist

Want to learn how to run your own course beta test? Join the waitlist here.

Whiteboard beta-test plan

I started off with my standard messy Google doc.

From that, I pulled out an overarching plan, which I put on a messy whiteboard.

I had some of these sections drafted, but not a lot overall. I created the majority of the content as we went.

Next time I think I’ll spend a week drafting some more content – I found being faced with a nearly blank module at the start of a busy week quite stressful.

Sales page

Here’s the sales page for the beta test

As mentioned, writing up a sales page made me get ALL the details mapped out.

I had to structure my plan really clearly, work out the dates, and try to answer all potential questions.

Explaining it to someone else, either verbally or in writing, is a great way to get really clear about what you’re doing. You just can’t gloss over the gaps.

Freedomkit

I used FreedomKit to test the course.

It worked fairly well, and it’s definitely usable, but I’ll be returning to ThriveCart Learn+ for the final version. I think FreedomKit will be great in a couple of years when it’s a bit more polished – it’s still a bit clunky, but that’s normal for new stuff.

Spoon theory

This is the original Spoon Theory for chronic illness

This is spoon theory adapted for neurodivergence

I have more spoons than many people, but when they run out the end result is the same.

Ivy

AKA the tiniest little Anglo-Nubian I’ve ever seen – she weighed in at 1.6kgs and was about the same size as my small cat.

After a lot of help at the start she’s mostly independent from me two months later, and the night feeds are a distant memory. Thankfully!

The welcome email

Here’s my welcome email that laid out what to expect from the beta test.

Business Review

And finally, the review I offered as an unexpected extra.

It was very similar to my Business Idea Review, which I offer as a bonus upgrade within the Business Idea Blitz.

Transcript

Hey, I’m Kelly Kotanidis, and welcome to Online Business from Scratch!

I’m taking you behind the scenes as I build my new online business from scratch to a full-time income while making sure it’s a great fit for my traveling homeschooling life. I’ll be walking you through everything I do and why, so you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

This episode is a little different from my previous ones because I’m getting stuck right into a specific thing that I did—and that thing is beta testing my newest online course.

This is a big course. It’s probably going to be my core foundational online business course that the others will branch off from, so creating it is a really big deal.

This is the reason why I dropped everything else for a few months and had a podcast break. It’s because I’ve been creating a course along with an awesome group of testers. Now, I’m going to take you behind the scenes and go through all the details of beta testing—why I do it, how I do it, the numbers—all the things.

So, this episode is going to be a bit longer than normal. There’s also a blog post that goes with this episode, and you’re going to want to have a look at that because I’ve included links to everything: screenshots, behind-the-scenes stuff—everything you’ll need to get a really clear idea of what I’ve done and how you can do it yourself.

Please check out the link in the show notes for all those extras. In that blog post, there’s also a form where you can sign up to join the waitlist to beta test a possible course about beta testing.

Yes, that sounds confusing, but the info in this podcast and blog post will give you a pretty good overview of what beta testing a course is and how to do it. However, if you want it all laid out step by step, I can create a course for you. So, if that sounds good to you, please go and sign up, join the waitlist, and when I decide to do that, you’ll be the first to know. You’ll also get the opportunity to test it along with me.

If you have any questions about anything in this episode, please just ask in the blog comments, Spotify comments, or YouTube comments—wherever! It doesn’t matter; just drop it somewhere, and I’ll see it.

Also, please share this with anyone you know in online business. This is a pretty useful episode, so feel free to drop it into your favorite entrepreneur community, tag some friends, or share it on your page or profile. I think they’ll find it pretty valuable, and it also helps me reach more people. So, thanks so much if you do that!

Alright, now let’s get into exactly how I just finished beta testing my online course.

As I mentioned in the last episode, I started a part-time job a while back. I kind of accidentally fell into this really good job, so I took four weeks off my business. For the first few weeks, I was just wrecked by work, so I didn’t really think about my business. I was adjusting to all the new stuff.

But about three weeks in, I started to get used to it, I revived a little, and I started to think, “Well, what’s next? What can I do with my business?”

I really had two choices:

1. I could keep my business as it was while we were traveling—keep it low-stress, focus on my three-day-a-week job, and just potter along doing free and small things, keeping it really minimal.
2. Or I could go big and create a decent course that I could sell for a decent price.

I talked about this with my husband, and he said, “Why is this even an option? Stop dithering. Just make your bloody course.”

We had a few conversations about it because I was worried about the time commitment. Mostly, I didn’t want to commit to something that would exhaust me and turn my life into chaos.

He said, “Look, don’t worry. We can make it happen.” He was happy to take over whatever he needed to help me get the time because, realistically, he loves the magical internet money as much as I do.

We have huge plans to travel overseas, do thru-hikes, and heaps of trail running, so he’s fully in support of whatever I need to make that a reality for us when the kids are older. Big shoutout to my husband for taking over a lot of the day-to-day stuff for me over the past few months.

He gave me a huge kick up the bum and said, “Look, you’ve got enough free stuff. You’ve got a small product. It’s time to start making stuff that will actually make you decent money. Something bigger. Something more valuable. Just do it. We’ll make it fit. The sooner, the better.”

And he was right. I knew he was right. So, I started looking into it.

The course he was talking about is an Online Business Foundations Course that I’d been thinking about for ages—probably years before I even started this business. As I’ve gone through multiple businesses, I’ve really been able to see the basics—the foundational stuff that everyone needs.

It’s the stuff that just works, no matter what you’re doing.

This course is designed for people who are new to online business. It’s step-by-step and helps them skip distractions and time-wasting activities, focusing instead on building a really solid foundation.

It’s specifically designed for evergreen and passive income strategies.

In it, we focus on creating a setup that allows you to get traffic and sell products with minimal input, so you can have a decent life and do what you want without working endless hours.

It’s not especially hard to do this, but it’s hard to know what to do and how to do it. There are so many shiny distractions out there—things you just don’t need, especially when starting out.

Since I’ve been doing this since 2015 (and longer if you count selling handmade stuff online), I know what works in the long term. I’ve seen so many trends come and go, but I’ve also seen strategies that are absolutely timeless and will keep repaying you for years.

So that’s what the course really focuses on—having the great topic, a solid content foundation, a great product plan, and establishing all of those evergreen strategies that will keep bringing in passive income for years and years. Creating this course meant beta testing because I always test my courses.

This means I sell it for a low price to a small number of very interested people, and I create it as we go along. They get forever access to the course at an excellent price. They also get lots of help from me along the way, and in exchange, they provide feedback that helps me build and shape the course to suit them. It also gives me accountability because I’ve promised it to paying customers, so I have to do it. That time pressure is there, and I can’t just keep putting it off or stop when it gets hard.

Now, I beta-tested my first course all the way back in 2017. That course was Zero to Homeschool, and it just worked so well that I’ve kept doing it. I’ve kept creating along with paying customers who helped me create the course by being there, doing it, and giving me feedback along the way.

Still, I was a bit hesitant to commit to testing a big course because of the time commitment. So, I went to the messy Google Doc I had of my course outline with some of the content drafted in it. It’s just kind of like a brain-dump document that I do whenever I have an idea for something. I’ll go in and just put all my thoughts in there. If anything pops into my head at random times, I’ve got that document, and I just go and add it in. It’s pretty messy, but I played around with it a bit. Then, I drew it all up on a whiteboard so I could see what I would be committing to, and the idea was growing on me.

Then, I started to think about the logistics—like what I would include, exactly how many people I would need, how long it would take, how much I would charge—all that kind of stuff. It was still looking pretty good, so I started to get excited about it. I decided to do it. Once I decide to do something and it catches my interest, I tend to hyperfocus on it.

The next step was to see if there was interest by pre-selling it. After deciding to create the course, the next step is not creating the course—it’s pre-selling it. I had my outline, which was enough to start with, and now I needed to see whether people actually wanted it enough to buy it.

The first thing I did was email my email list because I already had a waitlist for this course. I’d mentioned the course here and there and said, “Sign up if you’re interested in testing this course one day.” So, I emailed the rest of my list and said, “Hey, I’m going to do this really soon. If you think you might be interested, click this link.” That link automatically added them to the waitlist group.

I sent that email out and moved on to the next step while my waitlist increased in the background. I needed to give people a few days to have the opportunity to see the email and click on the link or not. I then created a sales page, which I will link in the blog post. That meant I had to get really clear about what I was and wasn’t including, the structure, and the timing. I had to have it all laid out very clearly so people could decide if it was right for them.

This is pretty standard with every sales page I do. I like to be upfront and transparent and make sure people know exactly what they’re getting. But it’s especially important with beta testing because I want to make sure that the people who sign up are going to do the course, provide feedback, and interact in general. That’s part of the deal with testing—they get a lot for a low price, but that’s in exchange for their input.

I also created a product in ThriveCart so they could sign up and purchase. I wrote a quick welcome email for people who did sign up. This welcome email was just a simple one. I put a screenshot in the blog post, and it basically says, “Thanks for joining. We’ll start on this date. I’ll send you access before then.” Keep in mind, at this time, there was still no product. I hadn’t even created the first lesson of the course. I hadn’t even created a product in ThriveCart. All I had created was the ability to buy it.

At this stage, all I had was my messy Google Doc and my very basic whiteboard outline. There’s a photo of that in the blog post too. This is because I had no idea whether people would buy it. There’s no point creating something people won’t buy, and it’s best to find that out before spending hundreds of hours creating the course.

It took about a week for me to be happy with my plan, all the details, and the sales page. It didn’t take that many hours overall, but I had to fit it in when I had time. After that, I emailed the waitlist the sales page link—but there was no option to buy. I didn’t want impulse purchases because, again, I wanted the right people in there. I really wanted to give people time to think about it, read all the details on the page, and decide whether it was what they needed right now.

I also wanted to give them time to put aside some money for it because I know many people have to budget. I didn’t want anyone who was a good fit missing out because it just appeared out of nowhere, and they had no time to financially prepare for it. So, I emailed the sales page out with all the details. I said to reply if they had any questions, and I gave the time and date they would be able to join. This way, the people who really wanted to could make sure they got in, as spaces were fairly limited.

I was thinking positively here—you know, maybe lots of people would want to join, and it would sell out really quickly. You never know. So, to step back a bit, here are the details I decided on: I needed a minimum of five people in order to get a decent range of feedback, but I would cap it at seven to make sure I could give lots of individual attention. That was a hard number and not negotiable.

This meant that if I had four or fewer people enroll, I would refund them and say, “Sorry, it’s not happening,” because I couldn’t even fill the spaces for a test run. That would mean the course idea was probably not a great one, and I would probably need to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more sellable. That’s why I didn’t create the course first—because if no one wanted it, or they wanted something a bit different, what a waste of time it would be for me to create a whole course in private and then just hope people would buy it.

This is why beta testing and selling the spaces for beta testing shows you if you have a viable idea or not before you put in months of effort. If all the beta testing stuff works, you can be pretty confident that you have a profitable product.

So, back to the numbers: I put down a minimum of five people, a maximum of seven, and I was charging $150 each. To me, that’s a bargain for them in terms of getting forever access to the course and lots of feedback from me, but it’s also enough that it’s probably not going to tempt people who just collect things. People who would just sign up and not do it. People who pay $150 are so much more likely to actually value it and put in the work.

Plus, it means I get paid a little bit for my time. It’s nowhere near a sustainable wage, but my main goal here is to create a course, to make a long-term asset for the business, and any payment is a nice bonus, really. There was also a clause in there to say that anyone who wasn’t participating after a few weeks would be refunded and their access would be removed.

I have had to do that a couple of times in the past because people sign up and then just disappear. Again, I don’t want people signing up and collecting something they’re never going to use. I don’t want them signing up and paying a really low price for something that they then come back to in two years’ time when it’s worth ten times more than that. I find it easier overall if, a few weeks in, someone isn’t participating—that’s fine. I will just refund them.

Time-wise, I had allowed one week per module. So, it was nine weeks for nine modules, and then I built in another three weeks as a buffer—so, 12 weeks in total. I was fairly confident I could finish it in the nine weeks, but I also know that things tend to happen to me. Having the extra time really helps to reduce my stress levels, and I was really, really glad I did this because the shit hit the fan in my life, and that buffer was essential. I will tell you all about that when we get to it.

At this stage, I had the course and how the testing would work all planned out. I told everyone on my email list that I was going to do it, and I was feeling pretty good about it all, actually. I was looking at it all and going, “Right, I think this is a good idea. It’s what people say they want. I think it’s what they need. So, I think it’ll work.”

I had 58 people on the waitlist, so I was pretty sure I’d be able to fill the spaces. Overall, I was feeling pretty good about this—it was looking great. And, of course, I felt this way right up until the point where I reached the launch date and time.

Then I added the checkout to the page and emailed everyone to say, “Right, it’s up and ready for you to join.” As soon as I sent it out to those 58 people, my brain flipped to, “Oh, actually, you know what? It’s crap. No one’s going to want it. This is going to be a total flop.”

To show you how ridiculous brains can be—when I sold one of the spaces in a couple of minutes, I didn’t think, “Oh yay, someone wants it. Validation.” Of course not. Why would I do that? I just thought, “Oh no, now I actually have to tell someone it was a big failure and refund them when no one else joins.”

But actually, you know what? I’m sure three more people will join, just so I have to refund four people and humiliate myself to the maximum number of people. And so, when someone else bought about 20 minutes in, that’s exactly what I thought. Someone else to refund, so yeah. Please don’t think you’re the only irrational one here. These thoughts are completely normal, and they’re also why I always have something else to do on launch day. That’s so I don’t sit in front of a screen refreshing obsessively.

So I went to work, where there are lots of distractions, and my obsessive email checking is pretty limited. But it turns out I was being completely irrational. I hit five sales on that first day, and that’s when I thought, “Oh my goodness, I’m actually doing this now. I’ve got my five people; this is actually happening.” That was pretty exciting until I thought, “Oh wow, my next few months are going to be really busy. I’d better get started.”

So that was when I started creating the course. We had two weeks until the starting date when I’d promised the first module. Again, that’s another bit of a buffer, which enabled me to get everything set up and ready, and get a little bit ahead. I got stuck into it right away.

Before I get into that, I’ll just go back to the numbers quickly. I did fill all the spaces. I sold the next two in the next two or three days, I think. I actually ended up with eight people testing. That’s because one person had been asking questions and ended up committing to join after number seven had already bought. So I did make an allowance for that eighth person. Also, it was someone I knew, and I knew she would be a great inclusion, that she’d do the work, get a good result, and provide valuable feedback. So I was happy to add her in.

All right, so now I had my eight people, and I needed to actually do something. I had to create this course that I had committed to delivering. First up, I set up the course platform and community. I used Freedom Kit because I’d bought a lifetime account earlier in the year, and I wanted to try it out. I added a welcome section so the course wasn’t empty, then I added all my testers to it and sent them instructions on how to access it. This gave them plenty of time to get in there and get sorted out before I started releasing content.

Then I started creating the course while keeping it as a draft. On day one, I published the first module, which covered creating a clear vision and some mindset stuff. In that, I also scheduled some live sessions. We did a live meetup kind of thing once every two weeks. I also handled all the little bits and pieces in the background. There are lots of moving parts in something like this, so I just kept ticking them off until it was all set up properly.

Now we’d started. I had my eight people in, and we were doing it—it was happening. The first few weeks went pretty smoothly. I worked Monday to Wednesday, did business stuff Thursday to Saturday, and had my usual screen-free Sunday break day. I was managing to publish a new module each week, but I was pretty much at capacity doing that with those three days of work plus the course testing. If you’re familiar with Spoon Theory, doing both of these things would use most of my daily spoons. I didn’t have much energy left over, so I was being very careful with my sleep, food, and exercise habits just to maintain my functioning as much as possible. I also made sure to use my downtime wisely, doing stuff like reading or pottering around outside rather than taking on more tasks that could contribute to burnout.

That worked really well for the first few weeks. But then, because life has a habit of throwing in plot twists, my life turned a bit chaotic. Nothing serious or really bad happened; it was just lots and lots of things that popped up and took up my time. This removed all of my downtime and started eating into my business time.

For example, my husband had to go away unexpectedly for two separate weeks. While he was gone, my goat had triplets, completely freaked out, and refused to feed the runt. So I had a tiny little goat sleeping in a box next to my bed, and I was putting it on its mum to feed many times a day. I have to put photos in the blog post—she was about the size of a cat when she was born, really cute but also really demanding.

Around the same time, my daughter came to stay with her two German Shepherds, which was a bit hectic. We had some massive storms, which meant our power was out for hours and hours at a time. There was lots of cleanup, and I also had to do about six airport trips, which is a 5-hour round trip. That’s like a full workweek just in airport trips. When you add up all those things and a handful of other tasks, it wasn’t long before I was running at a pretty severe spoon deficit with no real end in sight.

When that happens, my sleep tends to turn to shit, my focus scatters, and doing stuff just gets much harder. Of course, all of this coincided with the more difficult parts of the course—the techy parts where I needed to be very precise and do lots of screen share videos. Because of course, it did. Why would it happen during the easy parts of the course? That’s not the way the world works.

I did keep up with the course for a few more weeks, but then I took one of my buffer weeks. It took me two weeks to finish a module, which relieved a little pressure. My testers were busy too, so they understood. They were all really, really lovely, and that helped relieve a bit of stress as well, knowing they were okay with it. It would have been much worse if people were there tapping their feet, saying, “Come on, hurry up already. Hurry up and deliver what we paid for. Why are you making us wait?”

[so they understood. Like, they’re all really, really lovely, and that helped relieve a bit of stress as well, knowing that they were okay with it. Because it would have been much worse if people were there tapping their feet, going, “Come on, hurry up already! Hurry up and deliver what we paid for! Why are you making us wait?”

I then also ran into some snags with the actual course. So, this always happens. It doesn’t matter how good your plan is—when you actually execute it, it will change. In this case, it means I started creating some sections and then thought, “Oh hey, this should be sooner in the course or later in the course,” or I came up with extra bits that were essential that I hadn’t thought of in the original plan. So, I ended up rearranging everything, which made it hard to keep track of where I was actually up to.

In the end, I just said, “Right, sorry everyone, I’ve lost track of the modules. I’m just going to create what I can when I can and publish it as I go.” And again, everyone was happy enough with that. I was still ahead of them, so it didn’t really change what they were doing, but it also added to the stress because I then didn’t have a clear way of gauging whether I was still on track, like I did when it was the one module, one week setup.

I also realized most of the way through that I no longer wanted to recommend the platform that I was using as an example because they have just made too many changes lately that I don’t really like. When I realized that I couldn’t even embed anything on a site—like nothing, not even a mail-light form—it felt like it was designed to force people to use the platform’s email add-on. That was when I decided I’d had enough and would need to find something better.

There were just too many issues with it that didn’t feel entirely ethical, and that was pretty devastating because it meant that I would need to redo many of the videos before I finalize the course and launch it. So, I also spent a fair few hours trialing a couple of other platforms in order to have something to recommend. I think I’ve found one. It looks great, and I’m cautiously optimistic, but again, it was just another spanner in the works. It was something else that threw me off and chewed up more time.

Now, you may be thinking that this course creation stuff sounds horrible, but realistically, most of the time while I was making the course, I was having a good time. You know, I had a big checklist that I could work through and tick things off and feel that sense of achievement. I could see the course growing. I was getting really good comments from lots of the testers, like, “Oh my goodness, I’ve never thought of stuff like this before! This is amazing! I love how you show me how to do this.” There was one like, “When I first did this for my business, it took me weeks and weeks, and oh my goodness, you’ve shown me how to do it in 5 minutes! This is amazing!”

So, there were heaps of positives as well, and I was having quite a bit of fun a lot of the time making the content, hanging out with the testers, and doing all of those things. So yeah, things went wrong, but overall it was actually a really, really good experience, and I really enjoyed it.

All right, so coming up towards the end, in the last few weeks, the life interruptions had calmed down a bit. So, my husband was back, my teeny tiny goat was feeding from her mother and living with the goats instead of me, the weather had calmed down, the dogs were all getting along, and I started to have a little bit of breathing space.

So, it was still full-on, but the last few weeks were definitely much more manageable than the middle of the course. Now, I’d originally said that December 6 would be the latest date we would finish, but as we got closer, I realized that I might not make it. I absolutely hate missing deadlines. Or actually, I miss my own personal deadlines all the time, and it doesn’t bother me, but I really hate missing deadlines for other people. So, I didn’t want to miss this one.

Plus, I was just over it by then. I wanted the course finished and put aside. I’d been working pretty hard for 12 weeks, and I wanted to have a rest for a few weeks, and I couldn’t do that until I finished it. So, I worked my butt off in that last week to try to get it done, but I didn’t quite make it, and I was really grumpy at myself. But again, everyone understood.

So, I ended up publishing the very last part on December 12th. That was nearly an entire week after my deadline because there were a few snags with the last module. So, I took the time to iron them all out and really finish it off properly. I didn’t want to do a rush job on it, and I thought, “Well, if I’m late, I’m late. No one’s going to care if it’s a couple of days later.”

In that last week too, I also offered a bonus. So, I said I’d review their business progress if they got it to me by a certain date. This was partly because I’d had to cancel one of the live sessions, and two others hadn’t been recorded because of glitches and stuff-ups. Partly because I’d finished a bit late, but also because everyone had been great with a couple of delays and my messy method of creating the course. Everyone had just been so laid-back and so kind that I wanted to do something extra nice and extra helpful for them.

I also want to put in here that we will always notice our own issues more than others will. So, from speaking to the testers, I realized that they really didn’t notice any issues with me creating the course. They weren’t tracking my dates. I was still ahead of them, and that was all they were paying attention to. I always told them exactly what was going on, if something was delayed or I’d shifted the course structure.

To them, everything was going smoothly, and it was just a natural part of what I was doing. So, it was only really me that was obsessing about being late or thinking I was doing a crappy job. This has happened to me other times as well.

For example, I remember organizing a summit but not being able to give it my full attention. The presenters were always like, “What do you mean? I hadn’t noticed anything. It all looks fantastic from my end. It’s going really well from where I’m standing.”

So, try not to beat yourself up too much if you’re doing a big thing and it feels really chaotic. The chances are that people are not even going to notice. They’re just going to assume that everything is ticking along nicely on your end because, from their end, it still looks pretty good.

All right, so I wrapped up the course two weeks ago at the time of drafting this. So, I still have to send out the final feedback form. I’m still having to review the submitted business ideas and progress from the testers, and then I need to redo the entire bloody thing.

Because the thing with beta testing is that you end up with a really good first draft, but it does all need to be reviewed and polished before it’s finalized and ready for its proper launch. But I’ve been really enjoying having some time off. Beta testing was pretty intense, and so I think it’s important to follow that up with some more relaxed time.

I definitely can’t go full speed all the time, so I’ve had a bit of a break to refresh and catch up on some other stuff like this podcast before I get stuck back into finalizing the course. But the huge positive now is that I have a nearly finished big course.

So, I haven’t set a final price for it yet. I haven’t even got a name for it yet. I don’t know. I’m thinking “Online Business Foundations” or “Evergreen Essentials” or—I don’t really know. I’ve got a random list of words at the moment. If you have any great ideas, let me know.

So, yeah, I have no name. I haven’t set a final price yet, but it will start out at multiple hundreds of dollars. And it’s evergreen stuff. It is definitely based in those timeless strategies to build that really solid business foundation so this course is going to be a huge long-term asset to my business. It is definitely well worth dropping everything else for a few months and having life be a bit hectic for a while.

And that’s really the big picture thinking that helps people succeed in business because this podcast, it’s great. Lots of people listen to it. But in the long term, no one will notice me disappearing for a few months. It’s just a blip, but I will have this course for years. So now that core content is there, it will just need updating and polishing regularly, and I can just keep selling it over and over and over again.

So, if there’s a big thing you know you could be doing—something that will really move your business forward, like creating a course or some other big digital product—then I really encourage you to work out a way to do it.

And if that means you have to drop a few things for a while, so be it. Don’t feel guilty about pausing your podcast or ditching your social accounts or not posting on your blog or even not emailing if that’s what you have to do.

My evergreen email sequence ran out for the first group of subscribers, and I just didn’t have time to add more emails on, so I didn’t. And they missed out for a while. Just do whatever you need to get that big thing done, because it really is those big things that will help you scale your income.

All right, so that’s where I’m at right now. Got a few more things to finish up. I’ve got to go over and polish it again, and hopefully, I’m looking at launching sort of late January, early February—in about four to five weeks’ time. I haven’t set any dates yet. I really need to sit down and do that and give myself a deadline.

Now, if you’re interested in this, don’t forget the blog post that goes with this episode. It’s got links to everything. It’s got screenshots. It’s got all the good behind-the-scenes stuff so that you can get a really clear idea of what I’ve done and how you can do it yourself.

So, the link to that is in the show notes. I would love to see you sign up for my waitlist and get the opportunity to beta test a course about beta testing.

If you also want to get paid to create a product and to know that the product you’re creating will actually work for your people, then you want to be on that list. So sign up now. I might not do it for a little while, but I do get around to these things eventually.

And if you remember where I talked about just mentioning the waitlist for my course that I’ve just tested, this is an example of me doing it again. So, whenever I did workshops or anything like that, I’d go, “Hey, yeah, I’m thinking about creating this course. Go sign up for the waitlist.”

That’s where those 58 people came from. That’s where my testers came from for this course. So feel free to mention all these random things that you’re thinking of doing. If you don’t end up doing them, no one will probably notice. But if you do want to do them, then you’ve already got a group of interested people ready and waiting for you.

All right, so if you have any questions, you can ask in the blog comments or the Spotify comments or the YouTube comments—wherever you are. Just drop it somewhere, and I will see it.

And again, if you found this really useful, please share this with people you know in online business—maybe your favorite business community. I think they will find it pretty valuable, and it also helps me reach more people. So thank you very, very much if you do that. I really appreciate it.

All right, so that was huge compared to normal. Thank you so much for hanging out with me right until the very end. Please let me know what you think, and I’d love to hear your comments and questions.

And I will be back next time with my 2024 wrap-up, because it’s time to see how the first year of my new business went overall. I’m a little bit nervous about that, but I will do it and show you all the details. So, I will see you then.

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