The Course Mentors Podcast
Hey there, future course creator!
Ever feel like turning your know-how into an online course is like trying to solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded? Well, grab your headphones because "The Course Mentors Podcast" is here to be your secret weapon!
Meet Aimee and Odette (that's us!), your new best friends in the course creation world. We've been in the trenches for over a decade, and for the last five years, we've been rocking the online course space. Now we're here to spill all our secrets in bite-sized, 15-20 minute episodes that'll fit perfectly in your coffee breaks.
No fluff, no filler - just real, actionable advice that'll take you from "um, what's a landing page?" to "holy moly, I just hit six figures!". We're talking everything from crafting your course to marketing it like a pro and building a business that'll have you pinching yourself.
Whether you're dreaming of ditching the 9-to-5 grind, adding a sweet extra income stream, or just want to trade demanding clients for students who think you're the bee's knees - we've got your back.
Think of us as your personal cheerleading squad, but instead of pom-poms, we're armed with proven strategies and a healthy dose of "you've got this!" energy. We're here to give you the straight-up truth (with a side of fun) to help you crush your goals and create that freedom-filled life you've been daydreaming about.
So, ready to turn your expertise into course gold? Tune in to The Course Mentors Podcast. And hey, once you're done implementing our awesome advice, swing by Instagram @thecoursementors and show us what you've created. We can't wait to celebrate your wins!
Let's make some course magic together, shall we? 🎉
The Course Mentors Podcast
From Hot Mess to High Impact: What 3 Versions Taught Us
Every course has a first version… and let’s be honest, it’s usually a little bit cringe.
In this fun (and slightly vulnerable) episode, we’re pulling back the curtain on the three different versions of the Online Course School, from scrappy orange slides filmed in a living room to the streamlined, action-first program we run today.
We’re sharing exactly how the program evolved over time, why we stopped overcomplicating things, and how every iteration helped us build something stronger.
In This Episode:
✨ The imperfect beginnings of OCS (and the hilarious branding choices we made)
🧡 Why version two was polished to perfection—but ultimately too much
🚀 How version three became all about lean, actionable steps
💡 What each version taught us about creating better programs
🔥 Why “version one” is the most powerful thing you’ll ever create
Whether you’re on your first course or your fifth, this is your reminder: you can’t skip version one. Launch it a little messier than you'd like, refine it later.
#OnlineCourse #CourseCreator #LaunchYourCourse #Iteration #BuildInPublic
Hello and welcome to the Course Mentors podcast. I'm Odette. And I'm Amy. And today we are talking about a what are we talking about, Amy? I always go to say, and I just don't know. Um, tell me, what are we talking about?
SPEAKER_00:This week, I thought that we would share the different versions of the online course school. So currently in 2025, the online course school is in its third version. It's in its third life. It's had three entire laps around the sun. And we've done three completely different things each and every time we've relaunched the program. So I thought we would go through and just talk about the three different versions that it's been and how it got to today.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, 100%. Because we talked about, I think a couple of podcasts ago, we talked about we only sort of work five hours a week and that sort of, you know, runs the business. But um like one other thing we do do is every few years we like completely reiterate the course. Uh that takes a month or so. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We've gotten very fast at it. So I feel like this is gonna be a bit of a vulnerable episode. I feel like we're gonna have to really get into some kind of embarrassing shares about some of the things that we did early on. And it's gonna be a bit icky for me, but I'm just gonna try to power on. So I'm just gonna go through the cringe of what we did. Even though I've got a couple of notes, uh, you can see them. And I just think it's so hard to look at some of these things that we did. I will never go back and look at the screenshots of what we had. But before I say any of this stuff, I want to make it really, really clear that people loved it. People have always loved it. It's always been very high quality.
SPEAKER_01:At the time, we loved it. It's like looking back at an old haircut. It was fine at the time. You looked gorgeous. You look back now, and it is, oh honey, what was I thinking?
SPEAKER_00:Rough going. But so some of the things that we did in back in version one are really hard to talk about, but I am gonna try and uh de-robe myself on this episode and tell you everything.
SPEAKER_01:But to preface, everybody loved the course.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, with that being said, version one. Okay, so version one was definitely a bit of a scramble rush to market. If you remember back in version one debt, what we were doing at that time is we were both doing our own courses. And we were getting asked from people left, right, and bloody center, can you please help us with online courses? Can you take what I'm doing right now and help me make some money? Can you help me get my course idea out there? Just from people that we knew just passively. And people were like basically turning us upside down and shaking our pockets for information. And so we were like, okay, all right, we can do this. And we both already had our courses. We both wanted to do this. This was something that we both thought we wanted to do together and we wanted to have a business together and to do this and to work with other women together. So, version one, we mapped out exactly what we wanted to teach. We mapped out the curriculum that we wanted, and we just got to filming. And we both knew that this had to be something where we didn't delay, we didn't sit down and talk about it for another 60,000 hours together. We also didn't have that time because we already had our own courses that were like taking, we're running those courses already. So we couldn't sit down for 60,000 hours and have a picture perfect angle in every single video. So we had to sit down and say, okay, how can we get this information across as quickly as possible?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we tried to make it pretty as well. Um, which looking back again, like the branding was horrendous.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think at the time we wanted oranges. It was weird. It was a weird moment for us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, like margaritas and oranges and things. It was just like some like Canva, like early days Canva clip art. It was really rubbish. And it was really rubbish, but in a rush to, you know, get it out and get the important stuff out, the ideas out. Uh, we didn't go with branding. We just sort of self-branded. And man, was I happy when we hired a Viranda for version two.
SPEAKER_00:In version one, a lot of the videos were filmed in Dett's living room with her dog barking every six seconds. I would go and pat the dog and then run back to the desk. And then I would run back, and then you would go get a snack for him, and then we would sit back behind the desk. Throughout version one, we would film whenever we could. So we would get together, we would film a bunch of videos for the program, and we would always make sure that we were both in every single video. And we would always kind of just be loosely chatting about the topics, and we would make sure that we were just screen sharing over some orange, orange slides for some reason. They were all orange, um, and talking about all the topics.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I remember we were in like a rental. I was still in a rental then, and um, we were in my living room and we were just sitting next to each other on a desk with our own computers on a Zoom call. Like we had to mute yours and use my mic so that it didn't like give feedback. It was so crazy looking back.
SPEAKER_00:I'm dying. This is so hard. Okay, but yes, at the time we felt like it was really conversational and fun, and we got to have a lot of fun with those videos. But looking back now, I think, oh my god, why did we do that? That could have been so much easier. But yes, that's what the videos looked like. And I don't know if you remember this, but there was five videos in the middle of the program. It was the middle of winter when we filmed the version, and there was five videos in the middle of the program where you were just wearing a really big coat. I was very cold.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know what to tell you. I was cold. You bring that up all the time.
SPEAKER_00:It was just a very warm-looking coat.
SPEAKER_01:It was, yeah, it aesthetically not pleasing. It was just really random, like just turning up in a coat one day.
SPEAKER_00:Out of context, it was really funny. Yeah. But I look, I loved these videos, and we were like, we laughed so much in them, and we had such a good time, and we bounced off each other so much in these videos. Um, and they were hilarious and orange, but they weren't our forever videos. I'm gonna say about eight months with these videos, and you know what? They were great. Those first few people that we had through OCS were incredible, and we had such a tight-knit community, and it was so special and so fun, and it was such a great time. Um, but both of us felt like the number one thing that we couldn't stand every time we looked at it was the orange slides. We just could not deal with the orange margarita sunset, sunrise branding thing that we did to ourselves.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I couldn't stand my orange hair as well.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my god, I just forgot about the orange hair. It was bad. It was really bad.
SPEAKER_01:Like it was, I was a cute little like I was cute ginger. It was um I'm glad I'm brunette again. Let's just say that. My natural color. If you know Paramour, it was Paramour Orange. Oh, not that bad.
SPEAKER_00:It was very orange. I remember early days we launched the Instagram profile. This is around the same time that we had the version one videos, right? We launched our Instagram profile, and one of the very first comments we got on Instagram was someone saying, You can't trust a girl with that hair color.
SPEAKER_01:Right?
SPEAKER_00:You can't trust a girl with that hair color. That is so rude. It was a very funny comment. Anyway, so I think at the time we were both just so frustrated with the amount of orange going on in our life. Yeah. And so we were both the very first thing that we did when we had seen, okay, great, OCS is working, people are loving it, people are getting great results, and we're having the best time and we want to do this properly. We want to really invest everything we've got into this. We turned around. One of the first big investments we did was to get branding done, professional branding and a proper professional photo shoot. Those were the first things we did, right?
SPEAKER_01:That's right. Yeah, we didn't uh change much as far as like flow and curriculum of the course for version two. We just wanted to polish everything up, I remember. So we sorted out branding. That was really fun. And then um we just polished everything up. We wore a consistent outfit, no coats in the second version. I think my hair was back to natural cover. And yeah, everything just looked a lot better. Um, similar flow, maybe a bit tighter though, I think.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think we built out a few sections of this version and we went deep into a lot of things. We did a lot of masterclasses in this, and we generally just spent a lot of time redeveloping everything to make it look really pretty and to deepen everything that we possibly could. So I don't know if you remember this, but I was pregnant and we both just moved into our own houses. Not our own houses if we were living together. I mean we'd bought houses. Separate ones. Separate ones, we're not that codependent. Um we had recently moved into our own houses, and I was pregnant, and we spent so long designing the slides. We put hundreds of hours. We just, I don't know why. I think it was like a trauma response. We were like, okay, enough of the orange. We need to really have nicely designed slides. And we spent months and months and months and months designing these slides, and there's so many lessons in that I can't even begin to tell you. And at the end of it, I was ready to give birth. We were filming when I was like 40 weeks pregnant, and we were just trying to get it done at the last minute because we were like, okay, we we need to get this filmed right now. But we had spent so long designing everything and just we just kept putting so much time into that.
SPEAKER_01:I think it was we just bought this branding, we loved it, and the design just went bananas and we had this hard deadline, but we spent so long, yeah, developing pretty slides that we forgot that, oh, we probably should deliver this information now.
SPEAKER_00:That was really fun. So, yeah, basically version two was the exact same course, but we did a lot of deeper topics into things. We added a lot of extra information to things, and we did a lot of extra, extra design stuff. And that design stuff went really, really, really deep. I wish I could tell you everything. We had so many designed workbooks, so many design slide packs, so many design swipe files. Everything had an extra element of design to it as well, and an extra element of polish. So whenever you would want, you know, to access a swipe file, everything would be perfectly branded along the entire journey from clicking on that link to getting the file to the all the sheets inside the file. Everything was like pixel perfect.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Uh never again.
SPEAKER_00:That was a weird thing that we did. So version two lasted the longest amount of time, right? Because version two lasted, and I'm this is if you're a mum, you'll know. But I, my son is two and a half now, and we've just refilmed. So that means it lasted two and a half years. That's how I count in months of my child's life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm the same now. Five months feels like 400 years, but my baby's five months and uh time just, I don't know. When you have a baby, time just changes. I don't even know what month it is at the moment.
SPEAKER_00:Like so we knew it was time for version three because I knew that I wanted to add a couple of things to the course, and I knew I wanted to roll out like a bunch of new ads trainings, a bunch of new masterclasses, and Dett had been wanting to tighten up a couple of things in the tech world as well, because obviously things had moved forward in two years, right? And so we knew we wanted to do version three. I don't think we timed this part very well, just for context. But how old was your baby when you refilmed version three?
SPEAKER_01:Like three months, maybe.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I feel like we started when he was about six weeks old.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he was still a newborn, but I think I think we wrapped it all up. And he would have been in like, yeah, 12 weeks. So yeah, there was probably like a month of refilming, would you say? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and like redoing workbooks and similar things, and you know, the whole project of reiterating took like a month.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So what did we do in version three? What does it look like now, the current version of OCS that we currently run?
SPEAKER_01:Honestly, it looks a lot more stripped back, not just the design. We didn't go mental wing on town lesson in version two on that. But really, it's um just stripped back. It is quicker and it is uh leaner. Like we just focused on the implementation of getting to outcome, outcome, outcome, uh, rather than um going really deep on points. You know, it's all the QA sessions are for. If you really want to discuss something in depth, QA sessions are great for that. But um, we really just went, okay, what are you implementing? What are you doing this week? Okay, what's the task this week? Okay, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? Um, really action focused, I think is what we uh was the was the big change.
SPEAKER_00:It's so funny to me that in version two, we were like, everything has to be so polished and beautiful, and everything has to be really, really, really in depth. And then in version three, we basically just like chucked that in the bin, went back to the start of what we were doing. And everything is now extremely focused on action, action, action, action. Do this step, get this action, do this step, get this action, do this step, do this action the whole way through. So action-based. We move, we moved so much of the extra fluff and so much of the extra why understanding that you don't even really need to be able to get the result and just okay, now let's get you out and get you making money, not sitting in a lecture, right? We also hilariously stripped all the design away from our slides. Our slides now are so basic, and I so heavily prefer them. They are so clean, they're so streamlined. It's really just now action, action, action, action the whole way through.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. And I don't think we really could have gotten to this point uh any sooner because it took like a few hundred people through to really get to okay, these are the tasks. When we see people succeed, this is what they're doing, you know? Um, so it's we couldn't have even gotten here any sooner. Uh, it took iteration after iteration to do it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And you know what else I love about this third version? Probably my favorite thing about what it is that we're doing currently inside of OCS is we separated everything up. So we used to, in both version one and two, and and everything we've done before, every single thing in the program was dead and I together, dead and you and I together all the time. So in every single video, it would be both of us. And in every single QA call, it would be both of us. It would be both of us all the time for everything. And I think that that was great. And I loved that so much. And it was great because we got to laugh through a lot of the videos and we got to have a bit of jokey, we got to have a little bit of banter and got to joke around a little bit with each other. But then there was also times when it didn't allow us to specialize properly.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's right. We have pretty clear specialties with what we talk about within OCS. You know, you're all marketing, I'm all like more logistics and things. Um, we do, and I mean more than that, but um, we do our own sort of specialties and it just like clarified things just for students as well. Like, come to debt for this, come to Amy for that. So it just it just allowed us to specialize a lot better. I think you're right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. I think that that's really great that the videos now are so specialized and so separate from each other, and we both get to just go deep into our own topics. And I think it again, it makes everything more streamlined. It keeps the videos faster, it keeps them punchier, closer to the point, and people can just very quickly drop into a video, spend five minutes, and then get action straight away without having to watch, you know, 20 minutes of us joking around and going through a point in a really funny way. Instead, it's just more like, okay, let's get into it. Let's do this, let's make some money happen.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, 100%. And those are the three versions, version one, two, and three. I am so incredibly happy with where we're at with this version. And the feedback's been phenomenal. It's been super exciting in the last couple of months just watching what we knew would work, work. Just you know, I I like we've done it for so long now that, you know, it's not a lot of guesswork, but you know, it's always so satisfying to see your baby, you know, come to come to life.
SPEAKER_00:I absolutely love what we've accomplished with this, and it's really been so much fun to go through every single version. I've loved everyone, but it's I think you said it best, it's like a haircut. Like version one is really a bit of an 80s haircut. We had so much fun with it. It was a bit wacky, it was a bit orange, uh, and it served us well. But it was time to move on. And then version two was definitely an extremely polished updo. It was tight, it was stringent, there was a lot of detail, there was intricate stuff to it, but it was a little bit finicky, right? And then version three is just like a no-nonsense bob, you know? It's cleaned, it's structured, it's organized, you get what you need out of it, and it's nothing more. And it really doesn't pretend to be deep and heavy and intricate. It's just action. It's action, baby. It looks good, it's and it suits, yeah, 100%. It's it's a nice bob. I think really, if there's one thing to take away from this episode, I would say that don't be afraid of starting out with something that's a little bit less than perfect. And it's something that we tell everybody. I mean, even our own courses outside of OCS have really similar pathways. They we've always started with courses that we thought this is really great for right now, but I can I know I can do better in the future.
SPEAKER_01:The power of version one is is huge. Um, if you're not willing, if you go, if you're gonna be a perfectionist and um overthink things, you're never gonna get something out there. You don't know what it is until it exists. You know, you've got to watch it back and think, okay, cool, this was really good. People love it, but like this is how I'm gonna do it better. Um, not to say that you have to, you know, film your whole course and then a month later refilm it. Um, you'll do great in your first version. But if you think I'm gonna have the same version of my course for 10 years, it's very unlikely that even your industry will move that slowly, you know? So yeah, version one, get it out there, get it done.
SPEAKER_00:At each and every single one of these versions and stages in our lives and business, we've been able to get in front of people, help them launch their own courses and make a ton of money. And all of that has been because we chose to prioritize action at every single level. At each time we decided it doesn't matter what's going on in our life, we were going to create the best version that we had in front of us right then. And we'll continue to do this. In another three years, we'll have another version out that'll be even better than it is now. And that's just because the industry moves, we get better, we develop. And every single time, we're always going to do that. We're always going to invest everything that we possibly can into making these versions as good as they possibly can be.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. Otherwise, you'd be watching content from five years ago. Yeah. And that would not be very effective.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So don't be afraid of version one. Get out there and do version one. Yes, you'll cringe at it in a couple of years' time, but without it, we probably would never be where we are today. And we wouldn't have made the money, had the impact, or helped people the way that we've been able to.
SPEAKER_01:And on that enthusiastic note, we'll go out on a high. That was fun. I think we'll leave it there for tonight. That's one strong lesson. Do version one, reiterate later. Uh, and we'll see you next week.
SPEAKER_00:See you next week.