In my last update, I mentioned freebies and free trials as a way to provide value to my audience before selling anything.

Marketing folks also use freebies as a “lead magnet”. Basically, it’s a way to gather prospects’ contact details by getting them to sign-up for a free product.

Product designers and developers often use a similar strategy as well. They create a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) which is a version of a product that has just the basic features needed for it to be usable. The point is to get it in front of early customers who can then provide feedback and idea validation.

This is a popular diagram that illustrates how MVPs are meant to achieve the customer objective (here it’s to get from point A to B) with minimal development efforts. We start with just enough functionality to make it work, then iterate and evolve the product as we gain more customer feedback.

So you’re probably thinking, “Okay cool but what does this all have to do with creating an online course?”

To put it simply, an online course is a product. And I’m currently in the phase of validating my course while building an audience of learners.

So I’ve put together this plan that combines the freebie + lead magnet + MVP strategies:

Part 1: The Freebie 🆓

I’ll be creating a solution that addresses one of my audience’s biggest problems.

I’ve been researching how a common hurdle that course creators face is not knowing how to structure a course or curriculum. They’re not sure how to put together all their knowledge into a cohesive package that makes sense for learning.

In UX design, a method for solving a problem of this nature is to use journey maps. And so I’ll be creating a journey-mapping template designed specifically for course creators. Stay tuned to see the outcome of this!

Part 2: The Lead Magnet 🧲

Then I’m going to make the freebie available for people to access after they’ve provided their email. I’m likely going to use a platform like Gumroad, but still researching further.

(If you have other hosting recommendations, please let me know!)

Part 3: The MVP 🛹

Here’s the key part. In addition to the journey-mapping template, I’m going to set up a Calendly link so that people can book a 1:1 session with me to get feedback on their course journey map (aka their course/curriculum outline).

And guess what? These sessions will also be FREE! All I’m going to ask for in exchange is feedback to help validate my course ideas, as well as a testimonial that can be used for my course landing page.

Stay tuned!

As you can see, I’ll be executing a lot in these upcoming weeks. 😅 And I’ll keep you updated on how things are going so that you can hopefully learn from my successes and failures.

I’m really looking forward to getting into design mode and creating the journey-mapping template. I’ll also be writing some blog posts about journey mapping for learning experiences.

Speaking of blogs, I recently published an article about Creating an Online Course For a Knowledge or Skills Gap in Your Niche. It’s a quick 3 min read.

If you have any thoughts or feedback about my freebie strategy, I would love to hear them! Drop a comment or message me directly at brainoflaraine@gmail.com.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Laraine