The Best Course Platform for Your First Online Course (And Why It's Not Kajabi)

The wrong course platform can wreck your first online course launch before you make a single sale. If you're researching Kajabi, Teachable, or Thinkific for your course creation setup, you're about to make an expensive mistake.

In this episode, I'll tell you the platform I recommend to my clients, why the popular options are a bad fit when you're just starting out, and how I learned this lesson the hard way after switching platforms myself.

You'll learn:

• Why the most recommended course platforms are wrong for first-time course creators
• The simple math that shows how a $200/month platform can wipe out your launch profits
• How most platforms take a cut of your sales on top of payment processing fees
• How I wasted six months on the wrong platform and what happened when I switched back
• The one platform I recommend and have used for years across multiple courses
• Why "more features" doesn't mean better results for your clients

The big course creation programs push expensive platforms because they're built for people doing six figures in course sales. You're not there yet. And picking the wrong platform before your first launch is one of the fastest ways to lose money before you've made any.

Two Tools Episode mentioned in today's podcast . 

I'm Dr. Curtis Satterfield. I spent 17 years as a college professor building over 30 courses from scratch, and I help fully booked coaches build group programs that deliver real results for their clients and scale their business without adding more hours. 

Ready to stop spinning your wheels? Book a free Program Roadmap Call and let's figure out the right next steps for your course: https://curtissatterfield.com/work-with-curtis/

Note: This episode was recorded under the show's original name, Course Creation for Solopreneurs. The podcast is now called Program Design for Coaches. The name changed to better reflect what's actually working in the coaching space right now. Group programs where the coach is present and involved are what's selling, and that's the direction this show has moved. The instructional design principles in this episode apply whether you're building a course or a group program, so everything you hear still works. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:54

If you're like most first-time course creators preparing to pick a course platform, you're about to make a decision that could cost you hundreds of dollars a month before you've sold a single course. I've sold thousands of dollars in online courses over the past five years, and I'm going to tell you something that most course creation programs won't. The platform they're recommending is probably wrong for you. Today I'm going to save you from an expensive mistake. I'll tell you the platform I recommend to my clients, why I recommend it, and how I know it works. Because I made this mistake myself. After you decide to create a course, you start researching course platforms. And most of the gurus out there are going to try to sell you on one of the following: Kajabi, Teachable, or Thangific. And they all look amazing with gorgeous templates, marketing funnels built-in, community features, the works. But those platforms that you're being told to use cost upwards of$200 a month and sometimes more. And here's the part nobody talks about. You haven't sold anything yet. You don't have a course built. You might not even have an audience to sell it to, but you're about to commit to a monthly expense that's going to start draining your bank account the moment you sign up. So why does everyone keep recommending these platforms? Because the people recommending them aren't in your situation. The big course creation programs, the ones charging$1,000 or$2,000 for the program, they're teaching you to launch like they launch. They've got massive email lists, they've got tens of thousands of followers, they've got a proven system for generating six figures in a launch week. And when you're doing that kind of volume, sure, you can afford a bigger, shinier platform with lots of bells and whistles. Here's the thing about those programs though. The success stories they show you, the screenshots of$50,000 launch weeks, those are cherry-picked. That's the top 1% of the people who went through their program. I know this because I went through one of those programs myself. I spent$2,000 on it, and what they didn't tell me was that for most first-time course creators, the first launch is small. And that's okay and perfectly normal, but it means your expenses matter a lot more when you're starting out. Let's talk about the math. Let's say you price your first course with a pretty common starting price of$97. And let's say you're paying$200 a month for your course platform. You sell one course, that's$97 in revenue. You're losing over$100 a month just on the platform. You need to sell three courses every single month to not lose money on hosting. Now, let's say you have a decent first launch and sell 10 courses. That's$970, which sounds okay, right? But over the course of a year, you're paying$2,400 just for the platform. You're still in the red by$1,430 for the year. You need to sell another 15 courses to break even. Not make a profit just to break even. And here's the part that really stings. What if your first launch doesn't go the way you hoped? What if you only sell two or three courses? Now you're deep in the red on a platform you locked yourself into because someone told you it was the best. So what should you do instead? Let me tell you what I looked for when I was choosing a platform for my own courses. I wanted something that could host my content, deliver it to clients, and handle payments. That's it. I didn't need a built-in marketing funnel, I didn't need fancy email automation, I didn't need a feature list that reads like a software company's investor pitch. I needed a platform that did the job without bleeding me dry every month while I was building my audience. Now, are things like email marketing and website important? Absolutely. But here's the thing about all-in-one platforms. They try to do everything and they don't do any of it well. I've worked with clients who've quit Kajabi and went back to using separate tools for email marketing, website hosting, and course delivery. Because even though it's all separate, it worked way better than Kajabi's all-in-one solution. So I found Heights platform, which costs only about$50 a month. Now I'm not saying any of this because I have an affiliate deal or a sponsorship. I'm telling you this because I've used it for years across several of my own courses. It's what I recommend to my clients. Heights has everything you need to host your course, deliver your content, and accept payments. It connects to PayPal or Stripe. Your clients pay for your course, they log in, watch your lessons, access your resources, and it just works. And here's something that most people don't realize about those bigger platforms. Kajabi, Teachable, ThinkIphic, they all take a cut of your sales. We're talking 1 to 3% on every transaction. And that's on top of the 3% that PayPal or Stripe already charge you. Heights doesn't do that. Even on their starter plan, they don't take a cut of your sales. That means more of your money stays in your pocket, which matters a lot when you're just getting started and every sale counts. Now I know what some of you were thinking. But what about the community features? What about all the marketing tools, all the advanced stuff? Well, let me tell you a story about that. About two years ago, I made a decision I regretted. I was using Hike's platform and everything was working fine. But I started thinking I needed something more, more community features, a nicer looking community space, something that felt more premium. So I switched to Mighty Networks. It looked fancier, it had a dedicated community platform, it felt like an upgrade. And almost immediately, I was paying double what I had been paying on Heights. For six months, I stuck with it. I kept telling myself the community features would make a difference, my clients would engage more because the platform looked better. They didn't. When I actually checked, my clients rarely used the community features at all. And when I asked them, they all said the same thing. They logged in for the course content, but when it came to the community, they just weren't thinking about checking it daily the way they would their email or social media. They took the course, they did the work, and they moved on. The fancy community space, it sat there empty. And here's the kicker. Mighty networks doubled their pricing. I was grandfathered into the old rate, but they told me in six months I'd move to the new structure. That would have been$200 a month for features my clients weren't even using. Needless to say, I switched back to Heights. After all of that, after switching platforms, paying double, watching an empty community, and then switching back, what actually changed about my courses? Well, nothing really. My clients had the same experience. They completed the same lessons, they got the same results. The only thing that changed was I stopped wasting my money on features that look nice on paper, but didn't make my courses any better. The platform is not what makes your course successful. Your course content is, your transformation is, how well you teach it is. No client has ever said, you know, that course was life-changing, but the platform it was hosted on wasn't fancy enough, so I'm gonna ask for a refund. And if someone does say that, I bet you could give them a bar of gold and they complain it wasn't shiny enough. What matters is that your clients can access your content, follow your lessons, and get the transformation you promised them. And Heights does that for about$50 a month. Right now, for your first course, don't spend$200 a month on a platform when$50 does the job. And honestly, some people never outgrow Heights. I have a client who recently switched from ThinkIffic to Heights. She's doing tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per year, and she switched because she was having so many issues with clients accessing her content on Thinkific. She went back to Heights and hasn't looked back. And you're also probably wondering about payment integration and how that works. If you're selling a course on Heights, the payments are handled through the platform. Heights will ask you to connect either PayPal or Stripe. If you already have PayPal, connect PayPal. If you already have Stripe, connect Stripe. That's it. You don't need WooCommerce, you don't need a separate checkout system, you don't need to figure out invoicing. The platform handles it. Of course, picking the right platform matters, but it's not nearly as important as whether your clients actually finish your course and get results. Because if they don't finish, you don't get testimonials, you don't get referrals, and your next launch gets a whole lot harder. I recorded an episode on exactly that. It's called Two Tools to Help You Create Online Courses Your Students Will Actually Finish. I'll drop a link in the show notes. You've been listening to Course Creation for Solopreneurs. I'm Dr. Curtis Satterfield, and if nobody's told you lately, you've got what it takes to build your course. I'll talk to you in the next one.