Amazing thread. We’ve experimented and learned a ton over the last 7 yrs of @fortelabs online courses. Not only does the live cohort model produce better outcomes for students, it’s wayyyy more profitable and wayyyy more fun for us to teach. History of how we got there thread https://twitter.com/julia_saxena/status/1292005740073213953

@fortelabs was just trying to quit his day job and stay afloat 7 yrs ago. He started a self paced skillshare course on GTD that got featured as a staff pick. He learned how to create succinct lectures w/ beautiful slides and clear explanations. 20k ppl took the class.

What’s crazy is that it wasn’t even original content. He was just showing people how to apply David Allen’s GTD using the latest apps. It’s that easy to start an online course.

But it’s not that easy. He spent countless hours perfecting the slides and re-recording lectures and then updating the content as it quickly got outdated. The idea that an online course is passive income is a myth. It’s a ton of work to create, promote, and keep updated.

Large exposure led to in person training opportunities which were significantly more profitable than the courses at the time, but a lot more work. I came on board while in grad school to help w/ the trainings.

His second course, he spent even more time creating and investing in a fancy film crew. It was a flop and didn’t make back the $ we invested. It was a heavy lift that didn’t resonate with the audience.

At the same time, Skillshare changed their pricing structure and our courses went from making $20-30 per student to $1. Hard lesson learned on not controlling the infrastructure or owning the email list.

It was time to get a 9-5 job, but @fortelabs continued to blog write and create content. Then at the end of 2016, the idea for BASB started forming.

Instead of doing a heavy lift upfront, @fortelabs recruited a pilot group to test out the course in real time for free while giving feedback. The group met weekly and each week Tiago created the content just in time. This method took the perfectionism pressure off.

Tiago was thinking of charging $50 for the course and one student in the pilot group said it was so good that he should charge $500. That was an insane idea to him but he worked up the courage to do it and 30 ppl enrolled in the first cohort.

The first cohort met weekly for 6 weeks. Tiago was able to improve the pilot and adapt week by week. After each session he came off the call with a super high energy from connecting with students and being able to see how they interacted with the ideas

@fortelabs didn’t have any fancy technology just zoom and a Mac and poor audio/video quality. Everything was hosted on @teachable. But that was all he needed to get started.

The first year there were 5 cohorts. The learning cycles were super fast. The curriculum quickly improved with each cohort. But @fortelabs burnt out.

The following year he slowed down and made the course self paced for a year. By then the content was refined and he felt comfortable making it self paced. There was an active discussion forum using Discourse and spontaneous meet up groups started to form in cities worldwide.

He missed the energy from being with students. He started up live cohorts again but moved to 2-3 a year. Cohorts where open to all alumni students who came back to improve their systems & check out the updated curriculum as needed. Alum added huge value to the course community

During that time @HiredThought and other BASB alum joined the team as course/community managers and took the course to a new level. Tiago was no longer alone on this journey.

We continued to try new experiments. One year we offered a premium tier with coaches who did weekly private 1-hr calls w/ students. It was too small of a program that took too much energy away from the main course, so we dropped it.

The course continued to grow and after 5 yrs @fortelabs was no longer a solopreneur and it was clear he didn’t need to fall back on a desk job but that online courses could sustain his livelihood.

Year 6 was transformational for the business. @fortelabs teamed up w/ @david_perell to create #writeofpassage. David was a BASB alum, had an email list of a few thousand but had never created a course or even sold a product to his audience.

David had all the ingredients to be successful. He is a consistent machine at producing content, had a compelling vision for creating a community of writers, and had an existing audience. Combined with Tiago’s 5yrs of trail & error, fast tracked the success of WOP

After a few weeks of planning calls, David and a film crew flew out to Mexico City to create WOP. Every night they sent a pilot video to a beta group for feedback & got it all shot in one week!

Over the last year our online course learning has been exponential. With each cohort of WOP, BASB learns new techniques and vice versa. We also share overhead costs and staff, making it easier to focus more on content creation and less on infrastructure

This year we partned with more course creators and brought on our first full time staff member @will_mannon who’s taking online education and the student experience to a new level.

We are deep into planning #BASB cohort 11 & it’s not easier because we’ve done it 10 times before and now have staff. It’s always brand new b/c we are taking the course to new heights w/ each iteration.

We completely revamped the curriculum & are filming new lectures for the first time in years. This year we launched a mentor program which we are doubling down on this cohort. We can’t wait to be with students next month and learn with them along the way.