Empowering creator-educators with the tools to monetise their audience with Olivia Owens from Teachable

The Business of Creators is a podcast for content creators and everyone interested in the Creator Economy. On this show Ian Shepherd speaks with the pioneers shaping the industry and digs deeper to get the scoop on new ways to create, distribute and monetize content.

Ian is co-founder of Electrify Video Partners,  a company investing $m in established creators to accelerate their growth. Check out electrify.video.

Over the last few months I’ve been diving head first into learning about the leading platforms supporting creators with digital products and courses. And in this episode I speak with Olivia Owens from Teachable. She explains:

• How Teachable supports creators
• Provides some examples of creators that are having success on the platform
• Shares her tips for creators thinking about launching new products. 

There is a lot of information packed into this episode which I’m sure you will enjoy. 

Please go check it out and subscribe to the show for more interviews from industry leaders shaping the Creator Economy. 

Transcript

Olivia Owens  0:00  
Start monetizing as soon as possible. Like, I think as you're building an audience, I wouldn't wait until you have the 10,000 followers to put something priced in front of them. I think if you can create that habit with your audience early on, even if it's a low price digital download, a low priced membership, something that like creates that habit of investing in you and investing in the content that you're creating, they're going to be willing to grow with you.

Ian Shepherd  0:29  
Hello and welcome to the business of Creators Podcast, your essential guide to the heartbeat of the Creator economy. I'm your host, Ian shepherd, and I'm thrilled to take you behind the scenes and into the world of individuals and businesses who play a crucial role in supporting creators with their products and services. Over the last few months, I've been diving head first into learning about the leading platforms supporting creators with digital products and courses. And in this episode, I speak with Olivia Owens from teachable. She explains how teachable supports creators, provides some examples of creators that are having success on the platform, and shares her tips for creators thinking about launching new products. There is a lot of information packed into this episode, which I'm sure you'll enjoy before we jump into the show. Let me tell you about electrify video partners, a business I co founded that invest millions of dollars into creative businesses. We offer large, established creators a partner to help them scale the business, to step back or to exit altogether. Check us out an electrify dog video, or drop me a DM to find out more, right? Let's get on with the show. Today, on the podcast, I'm joined by Olivia Owens from teachable Welcome to the show.

Olivia Owens  1:40  
Thank you. Ian, happy to be here. Excellent.

Ian Shepherd  1:43  
So let's just jump straight into it. What is teachable and how do you support creators?

Olivia Owens  1:47  
Yes, so teachable is for who we call creator educators, who are looking to grow both their income and impact. And so we do this, we enable creators to do this by providing them the most comprehensive suite of learning products out there, so anything from courses to memberships to communities, downloads, coaching, everything that creators can do and provide to drive meaningful, meaningful connection with their communities and also drive sustainable revenues for their businesses.

Ian Shepherd  2:19  
Fantastic. Well, I've spoken to a number of creators that use teachable and but what's the backstory to teachable? How and how's the platform evolved over time?

Olivia Owens  2:28  
Sure, so teachable has been in this space for nearly a decade now, and we were originally launched as a an alternative option to create a course Mark marketplaces, so where you can take your content, put it up on the marketplace, and people can search for content and buy your course. In that model, creators are limited on owning the content, limited on the percentage of the revenue that they're able to get from selling that content. So teachable was launched to provide that ownership opportunity for creators and to increase the revenue that they're able to receive off of the digital products that they're creating. And I think something that people often don't know about teachable is that we serve both the E commerce and the hosting side. So not only can you upload your digital products on teachable but you can also sell them. And so we're really trying to be the platform for creators who want to monetize their expertise, monetize their knowledge, to be able to do so with products that drive ultimate value to their communities.

Ian Shepherd  3:39  
Got it that makes sense. And in terms of those different products, there's courses and there's coaching. Is there one in particular that you think teachable excels at, or creators tend to veer to when they're thinking about using the platform?

Olivia Owens  3:53  
Yeah, I think historically, teachable has really been known as a course platform. It's definitely where we're most advanced, given that's the product we've been working on for the longest. But I think in our industry, it's really important that the platforms are growing with where the creators are going. So we've expanded our product suite to meet the needs of creators. I think courses are something that take a decent amount of time to get up and running. So for people who want to get started, they can start with something like a digital download as a lead magnet to start capturing the emails for their audience, and move people off of social and into a more intentional, ownable space. And then I think it comes down to also the type of business that you want to run, right? If you want to do something that's more like a membership model, where people are paying you on a monthly basis and you're able to upload content there as you go, to keep it fresh and fun. I think that's one approach. Or if really you want to go deep on one topic and give them a large course at. Can work through, learn through, you're able to do that. So I think what's really exciting about teachable today is you're really able to build out a content ecosystem for your audience, leveraging the different product types that we offer. That's

Ian Shepherd  5:15  
great. And how does a creator get set up on teachable? What's the process, and is it sort of fairly intuitive, or their courses that they follow to learn about

Olivia Owens  5:26  
Sure, so I've been at teachable for almost two years now, and one of the most consistent things that I've heard from our customers is that the platform's really easy to use. I think it's really clear what you're going in there to do. So you can go to teachable.com sign up. We have a free plan that you can sign up for, and we've actually kind of made it even easier with our suite of AI tools. So I think one of the intimidating things, especially about building a course, is, well, what would I build a course about? And we have a tool called our AI course starter that allows you to fill in, okay, I want to teach a course about how to build a community online. I want it to be five modules. I want people to understand what are the challenges, what are the different things that you should keep in mind, how to engage your community, all of that. And the curriculum generator will build an outline for you. And I think once you have that kind of tangible image of like, okay, this is actually how you build course curriculum and build an outline, I can now go in and fill in my expertise and everything that I know. And I think that's accelerated creators ability to launch, in a way, but I also think it's kind of streamlined the process of figuring out where to start. Got

Ian Shepherd  6:48  
it well, that sounds pretty impressive with the AI. And can you share some success stories or examples of creators that are really using teachable and what they've been able to achieve?

Olivia Owens  6:59  
For sure, what I love about the platform is there's such a diverse spectrum of creators. I've seen everything from bread baking to water watercolor painting to sword making. Like it's really all over the place in terms of what you can teach, which I think makes it really accessible and really exciting, because the Creator economy is so broad, and it's hard to figure out, well, what's going to be the right thing for me, but I think, like, if your audience is consistently asking you questions about the thing that you're doing, it lends itself really nicely to creating a course to teach them more about it. A few examples I love. One is Damon Dominique. He is a longtime youtuber with nearly a half million subscribers, and he's been doing language teaching courses for years based on his travel excursions like his followers love his content, super engaging, and he's kind of made an opportunity out of teaching them the different languages that that he's learned along the way, and taking a non traditional approach to teaching language as well to kind of differentiate, differentiate himself in the market. But he is gearing up to now launch a course about how to travel, like all of the things that he learned in his years and years of travel, like different things that you just don't know if you're traveling to new countries, things you need to keep in mind. So again, his audience has been following his travel adventures, and now they're going to get to learn what he knows. So I just love his content, the way he approaches it, the way he really leans into like being his authentic self and his content, and it's why he's been able to be such a successful creator on teachable Another example is Mrs. Dow Jones, Haley Sachs. She's a popular finance creator, and she's built an audience of a million followers on Instagram who go to her for her insights on finance, and she's making kind of the conversation of finance more accessible, more entertaining. And so she has courses on teachable about going deeper into some of this stuff that she's just start, starting a conversation on social for the people that she builds that trust with and want to learn more with her. She's able to point them to her courses. And then a final example, we recently did a challenge with the Creator, Abigail Pumphrey. She's the founder of boss project, and she teaches creators How to Grow digital businesses, and she's been on teachable for eight years. She has over 30,000 students on the platform, and she's kind of able to teach everything she's learned in she's helped on the consulting side of things, service based businesses. She's able to kind of share that knowledge and now teach how she's been able to be successful in selling digital products.

Ian Shepherd  9:56  
Got it. I love those examples there. And.

Olivia Owens  15:00  
And get investors to come in and help supercharge their their scale. And I think on the Creator side, you don't have to chase brand deals or rely on ad dollars. Like, there's a middle point of control and ownership that teachable provides. And then you get to operate from a space of like, what do I want to do from here right, out of choice versus necessity? And I think it's just been really interesting to see the success that careers have had on teachable I'm consistently impressed with just their business acumen and their thoughtfulness and their like, lack of willingness to compromise on the value that they're providing. So, yeah, I think teachable really serves that intersection point.

Ian Shepherd  15:50  
I love how the platform is empowering creators. Are you able to share any potential features or functionality that might be on the horizon and you're rolling out,

Olivia Owens  16:02  
yeah, so I'd say where we are heavily focused right now. We rolled out digital downloads, community and memberships, and I think we're trying to get those products to a place where they're really, really meeting creators needs. Our community just came out of beta recently, so we are in heavy kind of feedback mode understanding, okay, what's working, especially for creators who are their focus, is getting their students through curriculum. I think that's a different type of community experience that you need to create, versus one that's really focused on more so maybe like networking or connections, it's like all of these people are coming together, really around the digital content that you're creating. So how can you create a community that enhances that experience? Is what we're heavily focused on today, and excited to continue to get feedback from our community, to be able to build that out for them. Great.

Ian Shepherd  17:00  
And are there any sort of common mistakes that you see creators make where they're coming in and perhaps not thinking about it the right way?

Olivia Owens  17:10  
I think there is a heavy tendency to overthink the value you need to provide to monetize something, I think like especially for creators who think extremely deeply about their content, they're extremely intentional. I think they they come in with the mindset of, okay, I need to come out with a course that covers all of these things and goes in depth to all of these things, but the reality is, the human mind can only take in so much information at once, and you can create kind of a content ladder for yourself, of like, okay, for the people who are entering this, here's where I can help them start. Here's the initial information I can give. Maybe that's a mini course, right? Like four to six modules, videos that are anywhere from three to 10 minutes, just to get them to understand the concept. And then for those who want to go deeper, okay, maybe that's the larger, longer, bigger course that you do that goes in depth for that specific customer. So I think you can start small test iterate once your course is out there. That doesn't mean you can't change it or edit it. And then I also think I have been talking to creators recently about, from a membership perspective, is I think that there's definitely a segment of your community that would be down to build this membership with you, right? So, like, if you set up your membership in a way that's like, Okay, I'm gonna start with this bundle of content, a few kind of templates, a couple videos from me, but then on a monthly basis, they know they'll get at least one new deep dive video from me, one new downloadable template and something else. And then that way you are kind of like lessening the burden on yourself, on all of this content that you need to be creating to fill this membership, and also your community gets to have the fun experience of helping you build it as well and being that feedback loop. So I would say the biggest mistake I see is creators grossly overestimating what it's going to take to be able to drive immediate impact to their community.

Ian Shepherd  19:24  
Got it very wise words there. And how does teachable support creators on the platform?

Olivia Owens  19:31  
Yeah, our biggest focus is being a business partner to our creators. That's really how we see ourselves. So I think when it comes to the E commerce side of things. Early on in teachable history, we invested in on our payments, product handling, some of the nitty gritty kind of like operational stuff for creators. So we handle, we do tax handling for our creators, I think, like if. Platforms can anticipate the challenges that you're going to experience before you even know it's going to be a problem. That means a platform is serving you right and being that true business partner. So that's one of the things. Like, when I talk to our creators, like, what's their favorite thing about teachable it's the fact that they don't have to think about handling all the taxes on all of the digital products that they've sold over the year. This podcast is coming out after tax season, but I'm sure many people are still feeling the pain of that process. So I think, like any way that we can continue to be business partners to our creators in that way is huge in my role, I'm the creator partnerships manager at teachable so I'm always thinking of unique ways that we can add value to our creators. So are there rooms that we can get them into because of the access that we have in our network? Are there connections that we can make between them based on the challenges that they're experiencing? So I think we view ourselves as a business partner, not just from a product perspective, but also from a partnership, connection perspective as well. Excellent.

Ian Shepherd  21:05  
Well, thank you so much for sharing your time today, and before we wrap up, can you just share perhaps one or two lessons that you've experienced working in the Creator economy?

Olivia Owens  21:17  
Sure, I absolutely love the Creator economy. Like I said, I joined teachable two years ago. Prior to that, I was in the the funding space and and working mostly with entrepreneurs. And I think there's an interesting overlap between the Creator economy and the entrepreneurship world, but I think there are also deep nuances that are really exciting to see. And I also think the Creator economy. Creators are by no means a new thing, but I think the Creator economy itself is still in its nascency, and I think the ecosystem being built around them is still pretty new, which is exciting and so I mean, I think I'm constantly learning. And I think one of my biggest takeaways is like the through line for creators is a lack of willingness to compromise. I was, we were both at the information summit recently, and there was a creator on stage talking to the YouTuber, and the interviewer was asking her, like, oh, like, is your big dream to have a TV show be on the big screen? And she was like, you know, I've been pitched a few opportunities, and I've said no to all of them. And the interviewer said, Oh, is that because you could just make more money on YouTube? And she was like, no, because I didn't want to give up the creative control, and I didn't the deal terms weren't what I needed them to be, right? And then another person on the panel was like, you've already been on the big screen most like, YouTube is now the most watched thing on TV. And so I think there's just a beauty that I think the traditional systems are going to have to conform and bend and adapt to creators in a way that I don't think I've I've seen recently. So I'm excited about that.

Ian Shepherd  23:05  
Yeah, I remember that panel session and that comment as well. Very relevant, Olivia, thank you so much for your time. If somebody wants to get in contact with you, how can they do so, yeah,

Olivia Owens  23:15  
they can follow us on all social platforms. At teachable I'm at Olivia l Owens on our platforms. Would love to connect and thank you again for having me. Ian, excellent. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Ian.