The Foundation Every Online Course Needs Before You Start Building

Online course creation starts with a foundation most coaches skip. Skipping it is the reason clients don't get the transformation they were promised. Most coaches sit down to create a course and start asking "what should I teach?" That question gets them into trouble every time. They end up with a pile of content that goes in ten directions and clients who finish without the result they paid for. The content isn't the problem. The missing foundation is.

In this episode I walk you through the four-part foundation every course needs before you record a single video.

You'll learn:

• Why starting with "what should I teach?" gives you a course with no destination
• How to define the specific transformation your course delivers before you build anything
• Why most coaches build for the client they wish they had instead of the one they actually have
• What prerequisites are, why they're different from your starting point, and why skipping them sets clients up to fail
• How to check whether the distance between your starting point and your destination is actually achievable in one course

Most course creation advice skips straight to marketing and launch strategy. But a course that doesn't deliver on its transformation won't be saved by a good launch. The foundation work is what makes everything else work. Do it first and building your course gets a lot easier. 

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. 

Grab the free workbook that goes with this episode. Every step is in there with prompts and examples so you're not staring at a blank page: 

The 30 Minute Program Foundation

Ready for guidance specific to your course? 

Book a free Program Roadmap Call 

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

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Before you start building your online course, there's a foundation most coaches skip. And it's the reason so many courses don't deliver the transformation that they promised. The first question most coaches ask when they sit down to build is, what should I teach? That question will get you into trouble every single time. And I have watched it happen over and over across 17 years of designing courses. Today I'm walking you through four things you need to lock in before you record a single video. Do this work first, and building your course gets a lot easier. So you sit down to build your course, and the first thing you do is start listing topics. Everything you know and think your client needs. That list gets really long, and then you start organizing it into modules. Then maybe you start recording videos, and at some point you realize you have a lot of material, but you're not sure what belongs and what doesn't. So you add more content, you know, just to be safe and add value. I'm doing air quotes around add value here, just letting you know so that you can't see me. The problem is that approach gives you a pile of content with no clear outcome. You can have excellent content on every topic in your niche and still end up with something that doesn't actually move your clients anywhere. And I see this constantly. A coach builds a course, records 10 videos, puts it out there, and their clients come out the other side without the transformation they were promised. Not because the content was bad, but because there was no clear endpoint to build toward. Think about a book coach who builds a course on writing. If she never defined what her clients are supposed to be able to do after working with her, she might include lessons on plot, character, dialogue, pacing, structure, and editing. All good and important topics. But she's teaching everything and landing nowhere. Her clients finished the course and still don't know how to write a character that feels real because nobody told them that was the destination. Here's the fix. Before you touch your content, you need to define your transformation in one specific sentence. Specific enough that two different people hearing it would picture the same outcome. Something like help clients develop a fully fleshed backstory for their main character that drives every decision they make in the novel. Not help clients write a better book. That second one is a vibe, not an outcome. And how do you know what the destination should be? Think about the clients you've worked with. What can they do? What do they have, or how can they be after working with you that they couldn't before? That's your point B. Write it down first because everything, and I mean everything in your course needs to build toward it. One more thing before we move on. Everything I'm covering in this episode, I've turned it into a free workbook that you can download and work through on your own. The prompts, examples, the whole exercise. Link is in the show notes. Okay, knowing the destination is the first piece, but knowing where your client ends up is only half of it. The other half is knowing exactly where they're starting from. And getting that wrong is the second most common mistake I see. I want you to think about the last client who came to you for one-on-one coaching. When they showed up, what did they actually know? What had they already tried? What were they stuck on? Now I want you to think about whether your course is built for that person or whether it's built for a version of that person that's a little more prepared, a little more advanced, maybe a little more ready than the clients you actually get. Because here's the pattern. Coaches build courses for the clients they wish they had, not the clients they actually have. They end up assuming a certain level of knowledge and tend to skip over foundational pieces because it just feels too basic. Then their clients get stuck in the first module and never finish, and the coach has no idea why. Let's go back to our book coach. She knows her clients struggle with character development, but if she builds her course assuming they already understand story structure and narrative arc, she's going to lose a big chunk of her actual clients in the first week. Not because they're not the right fit, because she built the starting line in the wrong place. Your one-on-one work is the most honest source of information you have here. Think about the questions that keep coming up over and over in your sessions. The same questions every client asks you every single time. And this is one of the most valuable pieces of advice I can give you. Your best course idea is usually just the answer to a question your clients keep asking. If you've answered that same question 50 times, that's a course. Now you're going to answer it once, properly, for a lot of people at the same time. So to nail down your starting point, answer the following three questions. One, what does your ideal client already know when they start? Two, what can they already do? And three, what have they already tried before coming to you? Write it in just one or two sentences, and that's your point A. So, you've got your destination and your starting point. You might think that's enough to start building, but it's not. There's one more thing sitting between those two points, and skipping it is one of the most reliable ways to end up with clients who can't get the transformation you promised. Here's a question most coaches never think to ask when they're building their course. What does my client need to already have in place before they're ready to start? Not what you're going to teach them. What does the client need to bring with them? Think about college math. Sorry, I just shuddered a little bit there. Before you can take calculus, you need algebra. The calculus professor doesn't go back and teach algebra. The professor is not going back for anyone. The students are expected to show up with proficiency in algebra and trig. If they don't, they're not ready for calculus yet. And no amount of good calculus instruction is going to fix that. Trust me, I experienced this firsthand and I actually talked about it in the previous episode. The book coach's character development course has the same issue if she's not careful. If a client shows up with no story concept and no understanding of basic narrative structure, they cannot do the work the course requires. And remember, they're not a bad client. They're just not ready yet. And if they enroll anyway with the gap in their skills, they will not get the transformation. Which is bad for the client and bad for the book coach. What your clients need to have before they start your course are your prerequisites. They're different from point A. Point A is where your client starts. Prerequisites are the entry requirements, the things they need to already have or know before they're ready to begin. Think of it like packing for the journey they are about to take. What do they need to bring with them to have the best trip possible? You need to list out all of your prereqs and then check that they're reasonable. If your list is really long, or if most of your ideal clients won't have what's on it, go back and look at your point A. You may have set it too high, and you might need a beginner resource or an extra module at the beginning before they're at your point A. Prerequisites protect your clients from enrolling in something they're not ready for. They also protect your course from taking the blame for a gap you were never meant to fill. Alright, you've got your destination, your starting point, and your entry requirements. There is one last thing we need to cover, and this is the one that'll save you from building something you have to tear apart and rebuild later. At this point, you've got three things written down. Where your client ends up, where they start, and what they need to bring with them. Now look at the distance between point A and point B. That distance is your course, and you need to ask yourself one honest question. Can my ideal client complete that journey? There are two ways to get this wrong, and both are more common than you'd think. The first is building a course that's too big. Trying to take someone from I've never written anything to I've published a finished novel. That is not a course, folks. That is a curriculum. You cannot deliver that in eight weeks. Your clients will feel the gap between what was promised and what's possible, and they'll stall out somewhere in the middle. Most of them won't finish. Take it from someone who has built entire college degrees from scratch. The second mistake is building a course that's too small. If the transformation is so narrow that it could be covered in a single email to your client, that's not a course either. Nobody's paying for that. Especially in today's market when trust is low and people are being more guarded with their spending. The book coach has it right. She's not promising to take anyone from blank page to publish novel. She's taking them from my characters feel flat and I don't know why, to I have a fully developed backstory that drives every decision my character makes. That is specific, it's valuable and achievable in the time she's planning. Here's how to check your own distance. Ask yourself these three questions. Number one, could a motivated client realistically achieve this transformation in the time you're planning? Two, is the course length something your ideal client would actually commit to? And really important, number three, do you, the coach, have the time to build and deliver this course right now without burning out? If you answer no to any of those, you need to adjust your course's scope before you build a single thing. It is a lot easier to narrow a course on paper than to rebuild it after you've already recorded 30 videos. Don't ask me how I know. That's your foundation. Your point B, your point A, the prerequisites needed to be successful on the journey, and a distance check. Four things most coaches never do before they start building. And here's what changes when you go through this exercise before building. You stop second-guessing your content because you know exactly what belongs in the course and what doesn't. You stop overbuilding because the scope is defined before you start creating anything. And when your clients start the course, they move. Because the whole thing was built to take them from a specific place to a specific destination. That's when you start getting the kind of results that turn into testimonials. And testimonials are what make the next launch easier than the one before it. Okay, I've turned this entire exercise into a workbook you can download and work through on your own. Every step we just covered is in there with prompts and more examples than I covered in this episode. That way you're not stuck staring at a blank page as you do the workbook. Grab the link in the show notes, carve out 30 minutes, and do this to make your course creation easier. You've been listening to Course Creation for Solarpreneurs, 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.