1/ @fortelabs @nathanbarry Your recent YouTube interview https://t.co/hZlBpxKYcE is one of the best and most useful interviews/conversations of the last 12 months - truly excellent. I tried to leave this as a comment on YouTube but failed, so here it is as a Tweet.

2/ The exchange at minute 57 - 59 was fascinating and I agree with Nathan‘s take on this. I am an expert in my field but a digital idiot and with little teaching experience.
3/ I have been fascinated by the concept of teaching what I know and promised myself to bootstrap my teaching business when I started at a friend‘s (@kerfrie) suggestion in 2019.
4/ I began with next to zero email list (real opt ins) but 30 years of business experience and a healthy network of personal connections.
5/ I conducted two pilots (Zoom with presentations over 10 clinics plus 4 Q&A sessions) and charged a 50% discount on my target price of $2,850 per student for them and managed to recruit 7 and 13 students respectively.
6/ My first proper cohort was a reworked version of the original pilot using feedback from the students and was my attempt at a Jeff Walker style launch (pretty weak version and before I knew who Jeff Walker was) which garnered me a few extra emails (maybe 50 or 60) and 10…
7/ …students, most of whom I knew personally or who were recommended by partners. If I had waited until I had 5,000 I would
- never have started,
-never had the invaluable experience of testing the pilot in the early (very overloaded) version,
8/ - never understood the excruciating difficulty of marketing a digital product,
- never tested the concept of building affiliate relationships,
- never explored the world of course hosting platforms
9/ - never have realised the crucial difference between being an expert and being a great teacher (and not been sensitive or receptive to i.e. @bazzaruto wisdom)
- never have thought to apply for an @beondeck course creators fellowship and
10/ - never had the first $15K of net revenue to begin the bootstrapping journey.
11/ So whilst Tiago‘s point is well-taken and everything would have been so much easier had I had an audience / community of 5,000, Nathan‘s more pragmatic approach is more true to my experience, messy and inelegant as the process may have been to a critical observer.

More from Culture

One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.


Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:


Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.


Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".


The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.

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