We've produced a lot of courses. Hundreds. They've generated 10s of millions of dollars in revenue and helped hundreds of thousands of learners level-up as web developers. From the beginning we've focused on quality and being consistent, and to do that it's important to have a process.

Not too much, not too little. Just enough process to get everybody on the same page and speaking the same "language".

These phases are repeated, as needed for any given project. For example, the first iteration of a new course product might be a simple landing page. The goal of the landing page is to gauge interest.

We will research the market, understand our audience, work with our subject matter expert partners, and do enough research work to provide a clue. Something to go on.

Sales Safari is an online ethnographical research method invented by Amy Hoy that continues to be an amazing source of research for our products. Here's a quick 

"in a nutshell" summary of the Sales Safari method

. For a deeper dive, we also love Amy & Alex's 

Sales Safari is interesting because it focuses on "customers in the wild" where they are comfortable and discussing their pain and solutions with peers, using their "local" jargon.

Another approach is the one described in The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. In many ways this is the opposite of Sales Safari, because you are actively interviewing to learn more about the struggles, pain, and solutions that your audience of potential customers might have.

This is dangerous, because what people say in interview situations is often not what they actually do IRL. They aren't lying, they are just having a conversation. There's a power dynamic at play, and they will say what they think you want them to say trying to give the "right" answer.

It's called The Mom Test because if you explain your idea to your mom and ask her what she thinks about the idea, there is a better than good chance she will tell you it's "great!"

The Mom Test structure focuses on the interviewee and says that we won't go into pitch mode or start explaining our idea. We are interviewing THEM to learn about THEM.

 is a tough pill to swallow, but it's essential to getting at the truth underneath the conversational BS.

Beyond those methods we scour the internet, analyze existing solutions, and generally consider the problem space while taking notes and building shared context.

But it's very important to stop researching and start doing. That's why we think about The Process as cycles instead of a linear start to finish. 🌀

The most common first thought when you hear "design" is probably visual design, but for us design encompasses more than just the visual aspects of a project, though those are very important too.

It's the capital-D Design that leverages the context that we've built during the Research phase and previous cycle of The Process and shape it into something interesting and valuable for learners.

We know what we are building and why, so this is the "roll up our sleeves" and build. In a practical sense, for us, this is web development. We are building online learning experiences, and that means we are building websites.

"If you build it they will come" is a crock of shit. It's just not true, and a recipe for failure. You have to share it. You've got to let people know.

Call it marketing, or a "launch", but once you've researched, designed, and produced something valuable and/or interesting for your audience it's time to let them know.

Once you've delivered something to your audience, something as small as a Twitter thread or landing page, or a full-fledged 60-hour video course you've finished a cycle of The Process.

Now you can start The Process again, using your new customers and everything you learned from all previous cycles as input for the Research and Design process.

We start loose, with a lot of unknowns and circle around the problem at ever increasing resolution, sharing what we learn, building valuable resources, sharing what we build, applying principled work, building trust, building relationships, and often thankfully earning a living.

The Process 🌀 we use to build Badass courses: Research, Design, Production, and Delivery

To Sell Your Course Online

The Process

The Process 🌀 we use to build Badass courses: Research, Design, Production, and DeliveryThe Process 🌀 we use to build Badass courses: Research, Design, Production, and Delivery

We successfully launched a pre-release of the first installment of Matt Pocock's Total TypeScript in December 2022 with over 1200 learners and $415,000 gross sales.

How did we get there? We followed The Process 

When Matt Pocock announced in early 2022 that he was working on an Advanced TypeScript course, my first thought was "Fuck, that's gonna be a banger. Wish we could work on it."

At the time our plate was full building a platform and producing Marcy Sutton's Testing Accessibility so I didn't pursue it. Fast forward to May, and Matt and I got to meet in Salt Lake City during a tech conference. It was brief, but Jason Lengstorf and I served him up a delicious smash burger.

Maybe that delicious burger w/ a side of home cooked fries really hit the spot, because a couple of weeks later Matt reached out and asked if we'd be interested in working with him on producing his Advanced TypeScript course.

The way we build educational products is a process. In fact, internally we refer to it as The Process 

™. The goal of 2022 (and 2023+) was to keep refining The Process 

This means that a new expert content partner has to fit into The Process 

, and also be willing to fully trust us and The Process 

It's a Goldilocks problem, where the partnership needs to be Just Right for us to know for sure we will be a success.

Matt and I had "good vibes" and my proposal was that we host a live workshop on Zoom around the core advanced TypeScript premise, and see how we liked working together.

Immediately we grabbed the advancedtypescript dot com domain and started planning the workshop.

 is iterative. We don't go through The Process 

 with increasing levels of scope and context.

The landing page is a cycle of The Process 

The first workshop is a cycle of The Process 

Each cycle layers risk in a way that makes sense both for our expert partners, and our business.

In our experience, going to big too soon is a recipe for expensive disappointment and abandoned projects that often affect personal relationships, which is a worse outcome even beyond the financial loss 😞

So we are cautious and like to take small steps.

Focusing on the workshop was the exact right scope. We sat down with Matt, discussed the contents and goals of the workshop and set a date.

Initially Matt wanted set a conservative date a couple months out, but I asked him if he'd be willing to push the deadline and shoot for the end of July instead. That's pretty tight, just a scant month to prep and SELL a workshop.

When Matt said, "let's do it." I knew we were off to a good start.

, Matt didn't need a lot of support. He got straight to work building the exercises and sequence that he'd present the material within a github repository, a natural environment for the TypeScript subject matter.

We'd first thought about building the landing page, because that's typical for us, but since this was an experiment, we decided to use an event ticketing service and skip any web development for now.

We wrote the page copy and set the price for a single-day (5 hour) advanced TypeScript workshop at 

It would have been fun to get a "live reaction video" of Matt's response to setting that price point.

It's expensive, but that was the point. My feeling was (still is) that what Matt had to offer was a premium offer to working professional software developers that are eager to pay a grand to shortcut their learning process.

When we launched, we had an "early bird" discount that knocked 25% off the price making it $900, but anchored against the full price.

While I was fairly confident and hopeful, there's risk involved.

That's all it took for Matt and I to look at each other across the digital divide and say "hell ya." in unison.

This was an early win on all fronts. If you do the math, that's a nice chunk of cash! Matt was full-steam ahead on the structured content, and we had real paying customers to cater it towards.

Fantastic, and an immediate handshake deal and agreement that we were all in on the partnership.

Matt nailed the workshop. Learners were happy. We were all ready to do the next iteration and take on the full project.

We liked Advanced TypeScript, but felt that it was limiting in terms of what we might want to teach. What if we wanted to have some intro content? Are these nerds gonna bust our chops on Twitter because it's labeled advanced and we had the gall to offer something for beginners? The answer is "ya, probably" so we started thinking it through and landed on TotalTypeScript.com. Still topically focused, but now in an expanded universe that we could work with.

 is the Design Phase, where we think about design in the Big D sense of Design. This includes instructional design, systems design, learner experience design, and OG course visual design.

It's critical for us that the expert partner LOVE their product and that it meshes well with their own vibe. It's hard to fake enthusiasm long-term, and setting the stage is important.

We always ask new expert partners for a mood board or visual exploration of Stuff They Like.

Off the bat, Matt gave us some images of beer cans and said "that's all I got". They were interesting graphical designs, but mostly kind of stark, maybe even brutalist.

Not terribly exciting, but after watching Maggie Appleton's amazing talk about metaphors Matt was struck with the idea of "TypeScript Wizard" which is popular in the community to describe the upper levels of advanced proficiency in the TypeScript programming language.

Instead of a visual mood board, Matt let us know that he was more comfortable with a narrative mood board, and 

"Did you just say fuckin WIZARDS???!1!" joel says with an excited glee.

He did, and it was on. A couple days later Michelle Holik dropped this illustration on us:

The tone is set and Vojta Holik used that to build the landing page.

Matt said it brought tears to his eyes. If you've never welled up because somebody designed your work something incredible, it's an experience that I highly recommend.

, most of the early iterations are about proving the concept and attracting an audience that shares the product's world view.

Matt is a savvy operator and was already capturing newsletter signups with a healthy base. We migrated from his previous provider onto 

 to be compatible with Skill Stack, our technical delivery platform.

We kept his homepage up and started getting the word out about Total TypeScript. Signups were brisk with dozens of people signing up every day.

People are very enthusiastic about TypeScript, and particularly something that isn't pandering to squeeze beginners for cash.

 primary driver of product launch success. There's a lot of work that goes into building a successful list, so it makes an excellent metric.

If dozens of signups a day are cool, hundreds are even cooler.

Our favorite way to ramp up signups is with 

An e-bomb is valuable information. It takes your expertise and research, packages it up into something people can use today, and then gives it to them for free. An e-bomb is awesome and something that you can link to so people will click. It's a lead magnet.

Matt streams and makes YouTube videos, and while he was busy working on a workshop series (more on this soon) he had an idea for a long form tutorial for YouTube around the popular (and awesome) Zod library for TypeScript. My response was:

Because what I wanted was something TASTY to draw people into Total TypeScript that felt like what the final product would feel like and give as an iteration on The Process 

 that would also let us start tuning Skill Stack for Total TypeScript.

After some prodding and discussion Matt let me know that the primary draw to YouTube for him was ease of use, so we struck a deal. Record the video series how you want it, and we will do the rest.

A few days later, Matt linked us to a stack of mp4s and it was fully and completely on.

We were in a good spot with Skill Stack because behind the scenes we also launched Marcy Sutton's Testing Accessibility which was an end-to-end iteration of The Process 

 delivering a set of self-paced video workshops as an educational product.

Taking Matt's videos we put thought into how we could elevate the experience and give learners something more engaging and interactive. The result was problem/solution exercise pairs that include an interactive IDE between each pair to give you the opportunity to try before watching Matt solve it.

You can check out the Zod tutorial here if you're curious.

The first problem video of the Zod tutorial is free to watch, but the first solution asks for your email address and let's you know why we want it.

Can you spot the day we released the Zod Tutorial?

It worked. Just a week or so after the first "pilot" workshop we'd also launched a badass free tutorial that represented another iteration of The Process 

Something we feel strongly about is providing beginner's a chance to learn for free. 

We don't want to sell them hopes and dreams, we want to put a hand out to boost them up so they will feel comfortable and confident when it's time to by into the advanced content, or better yet have their employer buy it for them.

Matt and the team were busy planning the Total TypeScript self-paced product, starting as a series of live workshops with Matt (more on that below), but we were also discussing topics for more tutorials and Matt decided to do a beginner's guide to TypeScript following the same format as the Zod tutorial.

Skill Stack makes this relatively "easy" for us (it's bonkers fuckin complex 

), even though it's still very much customer software. This next iteration gave us yet another cycle of The Process 

 to tune the experience both for learners, but the content engineers working behind the scenes to take raw videos from Matt and turn them into engaging 

For us the work with our expert partners is like a tennis match. They hit the ball over the net, we take it and do our thing, hit it back, repeat.

While we were working on the interactive tutorials, we were also planning a series of workshops that would represent the first self-serve product that would be sold on Total TypeScript.

Matt made a decision about the subject matter and we scoped out a set of 3 strong workshops to be sold as a bundle for $2400.

Asking people to pay $2400 for 3 single day workshops and then show up three weeks in a row to do the work is not a trivial ask.

Sold out. Another win, and now Matt had the kind of pressure he needed to sit down and build the examples and content for the live workshops.

 you know that it's not a casual process if you want to deliver something that is effective and enjoyable. It's hard, both for the instructor and the learner and takes a ton of energy.

Now stack three full-scoped workshops delivered back to back.

Matt dug in and did the work. Learners were happy, and we'd fully proved the concept of the material.

We wanted to launch a paid self-serve product in 2022, and honestly thought we could get the whole thing done for early December.

It was ambitious, and as we looked down the barrel of December at the end of October when the workshops were wrapped. Matt was coming off an intense gig at Vercel, and is conscious of his own (truly epic) tolerance levels for grinding out the work.

Matt recorded the first of the three workshops, and let us know he was going to take it easy and explore some YouTube formats that would compliment Total TypeScript so he didn't burn out on the project.

But we had a video workshop "in the can", a functioning platform with Skill Stack, and the ability to DO COMMERCE at our fingertips so we made the decision to run a pre-release with the first workshop ready for learners and "coming soon" on the other too.

Pre-Releasing Total TypeScript's First Product

Traditionally I'm not a fan of pre-releases because we can suddenly find ourselves in a situation of over promising and creating external pressure to deliver, but with this context and a full workshop complete my confidence was high.

with over 1200 learners

Pre-Release Launch of Course

$415k Pre-Release Launch of a Developer Education Product

Matt Pocock explains how he uses a directed acyclic graph for creating a workshop for Total TypeScript

for creating a workshop

Use a Directed Acyclic Graph

Use a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to Structure Developer Focused Content

Working with a world class information architect is a treat and has helped steer our thinking about how we structure educational content for the past three years. It's been a challenge to migrate. These core data decisions have a way of locking you into previous, sometimes poor, decisions.

, author of Everyday Information Architecture, and 

LMM looked at our lessons, courses, playlists, series, and other media

 and came back with a simpler, straight forward way to think about them.

Early on we were overly specific at the database level and described database tables as they were used or labeled in the user interface (UI). In retrospect, starting from more generic building blocks and working towards more specificity would have been a better approach for us, and thinking about structured content as data instead of UI makes a lot sense in practice.

There were a lot of take-aways from LMM's awesome presentation, but the main one was...

LMM included "special" which in practice turns out to be a collection as well, which led us to solidify our own implementation.

resource: a video, article text, file, or other atom

 of lessons, and sometimes additional resources

module: a full workshop, typically a 1-day workshop or shorter presenting a collection of sections or lessons (if sections aren't needed) and often additional supplementary resources

product: one or module modules in a collection

 is generally a direct reference to media. A resource is an interface or base type for specific kinds of resources. All resources share common properties such as 

 properties. Additional metadata that describes or belongs to this type of resource.

These atomic resources can be combined into a variety of collections. It makes things easier for us to think about if we give the collections names and use those to build consumable structures.

 which is a collection of resources that delivers a unit of learning. This is similar to building a page in Notion or other type of block editor. Stack, structure, move stuff around, edit, and present something that is coherent and meets the learning goals of the lesson.

It's great when a lesson stands alone, but they are often combined together into a 

. A module is like the chapter of a book, and might also contain other atomic resources like a project, overview video, or other supplementary/complementary resources.

If there are a lot of lessons, they might be divided into 

 collections. Instead of directly adding lessons to the module, the lessons first get added to sections, which are then added to the module.

This is "chunking" and helps orient and provide structure for learners.

Finally modules, lessons, and other resources are combined into a 

 which includes a price and can be purchased or shared with learners as a full learning experience.

The tool that we love to use to implement structured content is Sanity. It provides a delightful environment to design your content model and query it through a fast CDN for delivery to learners.

We aren't inhibited by an overly specified content model and can think and rethink what the shape of a lesson or module is based on the content, the instructor, and what the students expect in the context of the domain being taught and not the domain we used to store shit in a database.

for Courses and Educational Products

Information Architecture

Information Architecture for Courses and Educational Products

The Workshop Survival guide by Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt delivers the step-by-step blueprint for designing and delivering a successful live workshop for a paying audience. This summary focuses on the first half of the book which covers the design and production of your workshop. The second half of the book focuses on the delivery and facilitation of your workshop and is great as well.

A successful workshop is focused on learner outcomes and facilitates those outcomes for the learners that participate. It's your job as the facilitator to design an experience that will engage and energize learners.

Your job is to help learners achieve their outcomes.

You'll design a Workshop Skeleton that focuses on learner outcomes and iterate on that skeleton.

The workshop will consist 60-90 minute segments that are filled with 5 teaching formats: lecture, small group discussion, question and answer, "try it now", and scenario challenges. These segments will be punctuated with generous breaks to allow learners to recharge.

What you will not focus on is creating elaborate slide decks, and instead you will use slides sparingly to enhance and clarify the various learning formats.

Workshops are different than a classroom in two important ways.

It's your responsibility to design a learning experience that will renew and refresh learners and keep their energy and attention.

You are not limited in any way or stuck with the binding constraints of the typical classroom lecture format.

Your workshop will leverage the the most appropriate style of teaching and interactive exercise for the subject you are teaching.

To ensure that your workshop is a success, you have to do the work beforehand. You aren't winging it or delivering an off the cuff lecture.

Your workshops depends on you delivering a series of [[trail of value nuggets]] that give learners tangible "a-ha" moments. Every one of these is like a gold coin in Mario increasing your goodwill score as your learners level-up.

Every droning boring lecture or arbitrary questions that result in an ever decreasing number of hands going up depletes your goodwill health bar and spends the a-ha tokens you've worked so hard to gain.

When they signed up for your workshop the learner agreed to give you a significant block or their time, attention, and energy. It's a contract between you, the facilitator, and the learner. When you violate that contract by being boring, or asking the learner to do low-value tasks they will start to distrust you. For the learner, if they aren't receiving a constant flow of value, they will assume they've wasted their time and check out completely.

They show up with faith in your ability to deliver value and if you don't deliver that goodwill quickly fades and they will be on their phones before you know it.

To create a trail of value nuggets you've got to [[design a trail of value nuggets]]. This doesn't mean the final deliverables like slides or exercise. Those are important too, but here you'll be focused on the fundamentals, the outline, the big picture, or what Rob calls [[The Workshop Skeleton]]

Making slides first is a huge mistake and will ruin your workshop be trapping you in the details before you’ve figured out the fundamentals.

Understanding and designing for the [[learning outcomes]] that your learners want to achieve is the most important activity that you should be working on when you sit down to research and design your Workshop Skeleton.

Rob's other book, The Mom Test, is an excellent resource for researching learner outcomes. We also really like Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman's 30x500 and Samuel Hulick's Value Paths framework.

The Workshop Survival Guide describes three pillars of a successful workshop.

You've got to understand who you are designing the workshop for. This is how you know what to include and what to cut. Be specific. Be crispy. 

Why are they showing up to this workshop?

What will they be able to take away with them?

You've got to understand your audience if you have any chance of developing strong learner outcomes.

DO NOT underestimate the importance of coffee breaks.

Breaks are critical to your workshops success. For every 60-90 minutes of content you need to give learners 15 minutes to unwind and process what they've just taken in. Stretch their legs. Get some caffeine flowing. Chat a little. Ask casual questions.

What can they do now that they couldn't do before this workshop.

Designing learner outcomes is the absolute 100% no-question most important job you have as a facilitator.

Concrete, no-bullshit, "this is your new super power" learner outcomes.

With a half-day workshop you can expect to get roughly 6 learning outcomes accomplished. That's about 30-45 minutes per learning outcome, but the goal isn't to hit the "perfect number" or cram as many outcomes as possible into a day of learning.

spend more time per Learning outcome as opposed to trying to squeeze in more of them.

Learner outcomes are a cluster of ideas. They are the thesis of your presentation composed of sub-outcomes the come together to form the basis of what the learner needs to know, believe, or be able to do.

It's a fact that you'll have way more ideas and content than you can possibly hope to cram into a single workshop. Your job is to curate resources with a hyper-focus on learner outcomes. Not deliver some vague topic, but a clear set of high-value takeways.

The first draft of the Workshop Skeleton should take about an hour to create. Review your research, think about the learners that will be at your workshop, and most importantly capture the absolutely essential learner outcomes that you can think of.

Spending time focused on the Workshop Skeleton will allow you to iterate and think more deeply on the value that you'll deliver for learners in the form of outcomes. Keep your Workshop Skeleton close at hand so you can simmer with it, stare at it on your phone or in your favorite notebook, and work it like a piece of raw value clay that will be modeled into crispy learner outcomes.

This rough skeleton is probably shareable. You can get feedback extremely early. You can ask collegues or potential learners what they think.

much of becoming a better facilitator isn’t actually about getting “better”, but rather about doing stuff ahead of time which makes your life easier on the day-of

Your workshop will consist of a flow between 5 [[essential teaching formats]] that support the learner outcomes within your Workshop Skeleton. The formats are the building blocks of your workshop and should allow you to effectively fill in the space between coffee breaks with crispy value nuggets that keep your learners active and engaged.

 should support your Learning outcomes and help extract lessons-learned from other Teaching Formats, but shouldn’t overstated their welcome

Your workshop is not a series of lectures that talk at the learners until they are all staring at their phones or glazed over asleep with their eyes closed.

Lectures should start with a sections key learner outcome, add a few supporting arguments, and not meander into anything that isn't related to the learner outcome.

 allow students to wrestle with clear questions with ambiguous answers

This format is challenging but can be the ultimate teaching format that allows learners to engage and more deeply consider the core learner outcomes of your workshop.

Being able to design and facilitate small group (and pair) discussions is a workshop super power and spending time developing these skills will allow you to deliver successful workshops on almost any topic.

Small group discussions are facilitated and have a purpose. They aren't vague soft questions. They are crispy essential questions that dig into big ideas. These discussions are brief, 2-5 minutes, but the overall exercise will take 10-15 minutes of actual workshop time.

The discussion prompt must support the current learner outcome.

Really great discussions happen when there is no right answer and the question is very clear.

It's your job to facilitate the discussion by instructing learners explicitly and specifically about what they are supposed to be talking about.

Not just saying it out loud, but presenting it visually on a slide that clearly states the question and goals of the discussion.

Good prompts allow for good conversations, and it’s your job to figure them out, in advance, and ensure that they’re clear, interesting, and relevant.

if you're lazy in the design of the discussion prompt you'll lose credibility with learners.

 has a ton of problems, but should still be included after each Learning outcome (or before each break) to catch misunderstandings and act as a schedule spring

Unstructured Q&A sucks. Only confident learners will participate and it's just generally a bad teaching format. Q&A does NOT make your boring lecture interactive.

They do sometimes reveal overall structural flaws in the material.

Q&A is the first thing you'll delete if you are running late. Q&A gives you wiggle room in the schedule.

Badass Articles

The Process

$415k Pre-Release Launch of a Developer Education Product

Use a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to Structure Developer Focused Content

Information Architecture for Courses and Educational Products

Summary of The Workshop Survival Guide by Rob Fitzpatrick