14/03/2020
We work with many speakers, coaches and others whose work includes sharing spaces with other people. Since pretty much all events everywhere have now been cancelled, I’m seeing and hearing the pain. Just this weekend (and it’s only Saturday) I’ve had three calls about this, “Hey, I suddenly have no income for the foreseeable future. What can we do?” One quick idea, if you haven’t already done this, is to get creative with your services: Make them into online, digital courses. I’m not saying this to look for collaborations because I have my hands full with projects. But here are some easy to use platforms for creating courses quickly: Thinkific. Podia. Teachable. For more advanced features and systems, Kajabi. For Wordpress, Learndash (but you’ll need a developer to help you with it, and to maintain it).
Here are some notes I made about each. Not sure if the prices have changed or are the same at the moment.
THINKIFIC
- basic account $49/month or $39/month annual payment (no transaction fees)
- can start with a more limited free account
- Stripe and Paypal as payment systems
- Finns, Thinkific can be translated into Finnish
- can’t do live webinars but you can connect with FB live, Zoom, or other platform for live videos
- this is my favourite in terms of what you can do with the design and how cool it looks
TEACHABLE
- basic monthly $39, professional $99/month
- cheapest account option has 5% transaction fee, other accounts none
- Stripe, Paypal, credit/debit cards
- connects with Mailchimp etc easily
- same as Thinkific, doesn’t have native webinar platform but YouTube, Ustream, Twitch, FB, etc. live streams can be embedded
- Finns, you can manually customise this into Finnish
PODIA
- annual cost broken down to $39 or $79/month, I’d recommend the more expensive pro “Shaker” account so you can get a membership option on the courses
- supports Stripe, Paypal, no transaction fees
- integrates with Mailchimp, etc.
- Finns, this one is NOT in Finnish
LEARNDASH
- this is a Wordpress plugin so it connects with your existing self-hosted WP site
- you actually fully own the content in the sense that it’s hosted fully on your hosting solution and not on the service provider’s platform like in the options above
- one site license is $159 annually
- very robust and you can achieve a lot with it (you can have dozens of courses, or just one) but unless you have serious Wordpress experience, you’re going to need help in setting it up initially and with troubleshooting when any issues come up, so don’t get Learndash without having a WP developer onboard or you’ll cry. I’m a WP developer and Learndash still makes me cry sometimes
- that being said, it has much greater flexibility and functionality than the options above, for example it can send course attendees automated certificates, it has quizzes, leaderboards, and so on, but you need one or two add-on plugins to implement them
- Finns, Learndash doesn’t offer a ready made Finnish translation of the platform
Take care everyone!
