From Craft to Course: Building a Profitable Online Classroom with Thinkific’s Aaron Morin

Aaron Morin is the Senior Manager of Customer Education and Community at Thinkific and he’s joining me to talk about all things course creation.

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Summary:

A couple weeks back I introduced the On-Demand Platform Series and I’m excited to bring that first interview to you today with Aaron Morin from Thinkific! Aaron Morin is the Senior Manager of Customer Education and Community at Thinkific and he’s joining me to talk about all things course creation, community-building, and launching with heart. With over a decade in e-learning and firsthand experience with 100,000+ course launches, Aaron shares what works, what doesn’t, and how to get started (even if you’ve never taught online before). We cover how to move from in-person teaching to online offerings, avoid common pitfalls, and build a business that feels aligned with your values. Whether you’re a seasoned educator or just starting to explore online teaching, this conversation is packed with inspiration and practical takeaways!

Topics:

What Thinkific offers from websites, funnel building, email marketing and more and why it’s an ideal platform for creatives launching courses or memberships
How to start with a simple lead magnet and grow your email list into a steady stream of students
The mindset shifts successful course creators make (goodbye, perfectionism and imposter syndrome!)
Real-world membership models from creative businesses that have used Thinkific to get started and grow
Tips for staying authentic while using tools like AI and automation to streamline your workflow

Episode Resources:

About Aaron:

Aaron Morin is the Senior Manager, Customer Education & Community at Thinkific, the most trusted platform for creating online courses and learning communities. He’s studied over 50,000 courses to understand what works—and what doesn’t. Aaron has more than 10 years of experience teaching online and has launched online courses for Thinkific that have helped tens of thousands of people get started creating and selling engaging courses.

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Click here to read a raw transcript of this episode

Lyric Kinard (00:02.008) Hello friends, welcome back. And I am so appreciative that you are here with us, Erin Morin. You are from the Thinkific online course platform. So introduce yourself, tell us how you kind of got to where you are in the business of working on an online course platform. And then let's dive into what Thinkific has to offer our audience. Aaron From Thinkific (00:14.698) Thank Aaron From Thinkific (00:27.547) Yeah, thanks for having me here, Lyric. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with your audience. I'm Aaron Moran. I'm the Senior Manager of Customer Education and Community. And basically that means that it's my job to make sure that everybody on the Thinkific platform is as successful as they can be. I've been working at Thinkific for over eight years now. I've been in e-learning for over 10 years. And so... A lot of my expertise is going to be coming from watching a lot of the course creators and entrepreneurs on our platform launch courses over the years, how things have changed. I've seen over 10,000 or more launches personally, and then I have looked at the data of over 100,000 or more launches over time. So I'm really excited to give you any insight into Thinkific and course creation and digital product creation for your audience. Lyric Kinard (01:17.624) Fantastic. Thinkific is one of the really well-known and bigger platforms out there. It's been around for a long time. It's stable. It's fantastic. I've never heard anybody be unhappy with Thinkific, which is fantastic. And things have evolved so much over the last 10 years, right? I've watched so many different course platforms grow and add so many amazing features. So... tell us, give us just a basic outline, pretend somebody has never created any kind of online class before and they're like, what is this? What is this thing you speak of? Tell me what Thinkific is and what it does for somebody who is interested in creating an online course. Aaron From Thinkific (02:07.707) Yeah, so we talk about Thinkific as a knowledge commerce platform, which means that you are able to create products that encapsulate your expertise in some way, or form, whether that is eBooks, whether that is other digital downloads like templates, anything file based, as well as online courses with more structured learning experiences and community spaces where your customers can come to chat with you and other people as well. We also support coaching webinars, that kind of stuff. So anything where you are showcasing your expertise, you can turn into a product and sell on your own website using Think Epic. So a lot of people might have experience with other tools out there, e-commerce tools like Shopify, where you're selling digital or not digital products, but physical products. And so you can kind of think about ThinkEvic the same way where we're offering you a website and a commerce solution to not only bring your education products together, but also have sales pages and sales funnels and checkouts and all that good stuff that you need to sell your products to the world. Lyric Kinard (03:22.249) I've always thought about online course platforms as the building that's ready-made for people to walk through the door and you have to furnish it. But it sounds like more. You can build a whole website with menus and pages and other things besides just sales pages for each course. Aaron From Thinkific (03:31.739) That's right, yeah, you bring your products to the store. Aaron From Thinkific (03:43.589) Yeah, that's right. So you can build out your whole website. So if you don't have a website yet, you can use Thinkific to build out a whole site, but for a lot of our customers, they're coming with their own sites. And so you can also have Thinkific play really nicely with your existing website. We try to make it as easy as possible for you to get started. That's one of our main promises. So if you're coming with your own tools, we're gonna work with your tools. If you're just getting started, we'll give you everything you need. Lyric Kinard (04:09.639) Do you have easy template drag and drop website building abilities? Aaron From Thinkific (04:15.857) Yeah, absolutely. So we have a couple of different tools, but we're really happy with our most recently released tool, which is an AI page builder. So if you're a fan of using AI in your business, you can go ahead and drop in a couple of details about who you are, what you're teaching and what your style is. And then the AI builder will actually just build out your sales pages for you. for a lot of educators, know, marketing and selling is the hard part because it doesn't feel right to you or it might feel like something you don't have a lot of experience in. So we want to make that easier for you by just using some best practices and AI to speed up that process and make sure that you are putting your best foot forward. And also, if you don't want to use AI, which is something that a lot of people don't want to do, that's totally fine. Everything is available to be done manually yourself with really easy to use drag and drop tools. Lyric Kinard (05:07.403) And you can always use AI to build a first draft and it just gets the framework in and then you go in and make it your own. You adjust it in any way you like. I find AI amazing for crunching down all the hours in between the idea and the output. Aaron From Thinkific (05:27.237) Yeah, I agree. So the way that we are approaching AI Thinkific generally is that we want to put the educator first. So anything that you make with AI on Thinkific is yours and it will be trying to do it in your own voice with the prompts that you add to it. And we don't want to get in the way of genuine human connection either. So we just really want to help speed up the parts that take educators a little bit longer that they don't like doing. And we leave the other parts that you love doing totally up to you if you want. Lyric Kinard (05:57.1) And it is all about authenticity. When we are educating our people, especially in the age of AI, showing up yourself and real on camera is the thing that you want to concentrate on. So letting something else crunch the basic. grunt work, right, is fantastic. I love that philosophy that Thinkific has. Let's go through some of the, say I'm a teacher and I've been teaching in person forever. Let's say I'm a crafter and I teach knitting classes. Most of our people are very creative. They're doing hands-on work. What would be the process if I knew nothing about creating an online workshop? that you could walk us through. How would I approach Thinkific and how would I build out that part of my business? Aaron From Thinkific (06:55.525) Yeah, it's a great question. So I actually teach an eight week program for anyone who just gets started on Thinkific. It's called the Accelerator program. So if you do want to check out a Thinkific trial, make sure to keep an eye out for that. But basically in a nutshell, the process is very similar for most people. It just depends on what you're bringing to the table. So we always recommend that you have at least a small group of people that you can launch to or just get some feedback on before you get started because We really try to teach audience centricity when it comes to getting started with digital products. I think that, you know, the curse of expertise or the curse of knowledge comes into play here a lot of times where you're the expert, you know what to do and you want to share your expertise. But sometimes getting that in front of people doesn't feel exactly right just because you're making some assumptions about your audience. So in that program, we recommend getting started with having a good concept of what you want to build and then having a chat with some audience members. whether it's people that you've worked with in the past as clients, whether it's people who have come to your in-person workshops or anything like that, we recommend having a chat with them and just understanding what their needs are and what they would love to do when it comes to digital products with you. And then typically from there, we move into some business modeling. And so a lot of the times there are clues where success has been, I think. I butchered a Tony Robbins quote there. think success leaves clues. So we took a look at the best performing sites on Thinkific. And essentially what we see is we have what we like to call a value staircase. So when we're thinking about what to do first, we want to start building trust with our audience as a digital product provider, as an expert with. Lyric Kinard (08:22.861) you Aaron From Thinkific (08:48.209) things that you can purchase to get access to that expertise. And so that usually involves creating some content, usually free content, and then pointing that towards a digital download or a lead magnet, something really lightweight or a free webinar or something like that, just to get started in order for you to not only get some experience building out some really easier digital products. but also to start building your email list because most of the extremely successful creators on our platform are either using email lists or social followings to sell just because it is the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get in front of a warm audience. And from there, sorry, go ahead, Lerik. Lyric Kinard (09:40.503) Does Thinkific have built-in marketing funnels and email list building capability? Aaron From Thinkific (09:46.747) Yeah, absolutely. So we have connected to any of the free kind of lead magnet products, the digital downloads, the free webinars, the free one-on-one coaching sessions, those kinds of things. All of those are going to collect leads for you or email addresses for you. And the email addresses can be brought into Thinkific's CRM, our customer relationships management tool, email marketing tool. Or you can actually bring those to an existing tool depending on where you're at with your current setup. Lyric Kinard (10:21.887) I love the platforms that have the email marketing built in because people that sign in to say a free workshop that you've built as a course on the platform, you can set up email automations and they become part of it's the top of the funnel, the marketing funnel that you're talking about, right? But having it all in one place where you don't have to go from one platform to somewhere else like Mailchimp and then maybe somewhere else where you have to have Zapier in between. Having everything all in one place where can you set up, when they sign up for a thing, can you set up tags for them and then put them in different email lists and funnels and set up automations to warm them up before they go into a regular weekly monthly email list that is also on the platform. Aaron From Thinkific (11:18.671) Yeah, so we were really excited to release our email marketing feature very recently. And this is specifically designed for people who are just kind of getting started and maybe they don't have the budget for a larger, more dedicated email marketing tool, or maybe they're just not experienced with that. So it's really a fantastic way to get started here. And what it will do is it will watch out for new leads coming in. for specific lead magnets that you've put out there, specific digital downloads or webinars, et cetera. And then it will automate email delivery to those people to sell your products that are not free. So this could be, you know, one-on-one coaching sessions. It could be online courses, other digital downloads like eBooks that you might want to charge for. You can set up those email marketing automations directly in Thinkific. Or like I said before, if you do have your dedicated tool and you love using it, just send the lead over there and get started selling from that tool instead. Lyric Kinard (12:18.955) can integrate what you've already got in with that. When you talk about bringing in people, that would be people outside of the Thinkific platform that you have to market to outside of that, the social media or paid ads or YouTube tutorials, wherever you find your audience, you direct them to a lead magnet that's housed on the Thinkific platform. And then it feeds them into a whole system. Aaron From Thinkific (12:50.927) Yeah, that's exactly right. So when it comes to your leads and your content out there, you just always want to make sure that you are pushing people towards that. And when it comes to marketing, I think that's one of the key differentiators between Thinkific and other tools out there, is that we really do try to set you up in the best, fastest, and easiest way to do the marketing yourself. But I know that a lot of people out there are looking to get started and you know, getting started from scratch with marketing can be very, very difficult. You just don't really know where to get started at all, like where your priorities are. And so I have a couple of tips for anyone there. Basically, the best fastest way to do anything is to work with partners, in my opinion. So you can reach out to people who have incredible podcasts like this one, or you can reach out to blog. bloggers or YouTubers or anything like that. And they can put you in front of their audiences if you are supplying the content to them or maybe if you are having them set up as an affiliate, meaning they get a cut of some of the revenue earned from sales, they can do some of the promotion for you. That's the fastest way in my opinion. And a lot of people will actually go and put their programs up on marketplaces first like Creative Spark. In order to just get started and start having some of the revenue come in the only Difference there between thinkific and marketplaces is that those marketplaces out there? Typically have some kind of you know revenue split where they're doing the marketing for you, so they deserve some of it and Then on thinkific you're doing it yourself, so we don't do any kind of revenue split outside of our our monthly subscription fee Lyric Kinard (14:32.941) Mm-hmm. Aaron From Thinkific (14:41.667) and any like small transaction fees for processing the payments for you. Lyric Kinard (14:46.317) And if you missed our interview with Creative Spark, go back and find that and listen to it. See what it's all about. It's basically them hosting a course you create on their platform and taking care of everything. You create the course and then just let it go. they use Creative Spark, by the way, as one the most fantastic course. platforms for creatives, for quilters, crafters, artists, and they host it on Thinkific. So that's a great tie-in. If you have one of those courses, you'll learn all about the platform. Tell us, is there anything that sets Thinkific apart from, say, Kajabi or Podia or Zendler or Rizuku or all the other places that are out there? Aaron From Thinkific (15:40.539) Yeah, so I think one of the biggest differentiators on our side is that we have out of all of these platforms, we definitely have the best learner experience. So we've put a lot of effort into making sure that your customers are getting the best learning experience out of your brand and from you and your content. So our online course player and the online course options are the best out there for the price point for sure. And we have a lot of the exact same features when it comes to like all in one. And we have an incredible ecosystem of partners that you can work with to help you build out your website or to work with you on content to help you in any way, shape or form. So we also are the best in the industry when it comes to making sure that you feel supported. So our, one of our, brand pillars, one of the things that, you know, at Kickoff this year, our CEO, Greg Smith, presented to the rest of the company was kind of a reiteration of the fact that we're not only gonna be the best tool out there, but we're also gonna be your trusted partner when it comes to your business. So this is where those programs like the Thinkific Accelerator program come into play. We also have an incredible community for anyone who is earning over $100,000 on our platform on an annual basis. Called the Thinkific VIP community. So we have different programs that you can jump into and different resources At every single stage. We also run daily office hours and we have an incredible award-winning support team So I think that that is a huge differentiator because when you're just getting started and if you are, you know Jumping over from a different platform, you know, there's a lot of learning curve There's a lot of technical things to do no matter how hard we try to make it easy. And so we want to be there for you as a kind of business partner in this venture versus just like a tool that you subscribe to and you can hope to get the best out of. Lyric Kinard (17:45.146) The daily office hours, kind of that's a thing. It's so valuable to, you have one little thing and you might have a huge library of resources where you could find out how to learn that one little thing, but it might take you two hours to find where that answer is. But if you can hop in and know you can ask, hey, where's this thing? That's phenomenal. The customer support for the owner, the... the the teacher is a huge thing. If somebody is just beginning and building on-demand courses, it can feel kind of like a real barrier to entry of how expensive it is to get everything set up and started. Right, can you give us an idea of the price levels and what's included in each of those? And we understand that those will change year to year and that's fine. But what are they right now? How hard is it for somebody to get in to the ThinkEffect platform? Aaron From Thinkific (18:54.107) Yeah, so you can get started right now if you go to thinkivic.com on a trial. We're doing 30 day trials right now. So you can jump in on any of our plans to trial it out. And there's no obligations there. So it's free to get started for your first month. And then of course, you know, keep an eye out for any kind of promotions that we're running as well. We will do typically one around Black Friday. But you know, if you're listening to this at the start of the year, then don't wait, just jump in and explore. But The total cost really is not that expensive for what you're getting in our opinion, but we like to have some different pricing options just in case you have different types of budgets. the basic plan that we have right now is around $50 a month and you can pay annually to save on any of these plans by the way, but it's around $50 a month and it gives you pretty much everything you need to get started. There are some limits on how many products you can create. but we don't limit the amount of students that you can have. So that's the cheapest tier. That's how most people get started if your budget is low. Now, I think a lot of people dive in on the $100 a month plan that we have just because it contains a lot of the really great learning experience features that we've been talking about. so that's, sorry. Lyric Kinard (20:11.019) Like what? Like what are those features that aren't in the lower tier? Aaron From Thinkific (20:18.787) Yeah, so on the Thinkific Start plan, we have incredible learning features like memberships. We have live lessons. We also have some unlimited digital downloads and coaching and webinar sessions. So you can actually build out as many of those as you need. And then it also comes with some great sales tools as well. So we start offering the ability to run promotions using coupon codes. You can do some affiliate selling, like I mentioned before, if you're just getting started with partners. And then we also have the ability to set up your Thinkific checkout with some really fun features like order bumps. So for example, if someone purchases one product in the checkout, they'll be able to really just one click, add another product to the order as well as gifting. So that's a really popular one, especially around seasons where gifting is happening. We have the gifting feature and Thinkific checkout at that point too. so you can actually buy the course for somebody else too. Lyric Kinard (21:18.359) That's fantastic. And if you think about it, it's easy. If you come with your course prepared, you can start at a low level and work your way up. And really, getting one or two students in a month will cover the cost that you're paying. And it's providing so much value with all of the other things around the course. It used to be, here's where you can build your course, that's it. And now there's all these so many, so many, so many, so many other things that are involved. So we talked about the $50 and $100. What else is there? Or why would somebody move up or be on one plan or the other? Aaron From Thinkific (22:07.643) Yeah, so we also have our grow plan and that is $150 a month as well. And that is on the annual side actually. So it's more 199 per month if you're not taking that annual discount. And the grow plan is our last kind of stage before you move on into the think of it plus plans that we have. But the grow plan really is kind of like a... an option for anyone out there who is expecting extremely high volumes. So if you have a large number of students coming in, maybe you already have some students that you're bringing over or you're expecting a big launch, you know, with thousands of students, then that plan will contain a lot of the features that you need to serve those people. you know, you get your like bundles and add on packages, you get advanced think of analytics as well as like group ordering. So if you do want to sell. business to business instead of business to consumer or B2C, then you can actually do that on our Grow plan. The Thinkific Plus plans are kind of custom plans for you depending on your needs, but at that point, you are a larger company or organization typically, so larger team with some more advanced needs. Maybe you have a developer and a designer on your team that needs some advanced access and you need a little bit more support from the Thinkific team, you get your own. Lyric Kinard (23:20.374) Night. Aaron From Thinkific (23:32.997) dedicated customer success manager on those plans. Lyric Kinard (23:36.054) Awesome. So friends, when you've built your empire, there's room for you to stay on the platform, That is, that's fun to imagine and to think about, isn't it? So you have access to the backend data of watching. Aaron From Thinkific (23:40.272) Yes. Lyric Kinard (23:54.262) years and years worth of educators, creatives, people who are skilled in something and sharing it with other people. What are some of the commonalities? And let's think of our creative makers as our audience. What are some of the actions, the common things that these people do as they go from very beginner to being successful? What are the things that the really successful course creators doing. Aaron From Thinkific (24:27.791) Yeah, so when you get started, like let's return to that value staircase idea. So if you're imagining a staircase up, know, people get started at the bottom stair, which is usually content marketing. It's usually partner marketing, you know, free stuff, YouTube tutorials, those kinds of things. And the trust starts to get built there. So people might start subscribing and they move into those digital downloads, those free things that you can collect email addresses from. Lyric Kinard (24:33.868) Mm-hmm. Aaron From Thinkific (24:55.761) From there, the really successful creators will move on into kind of like a mid-range or entry-level product typically. And so this is very typically an on-demand course. And so usually price ranges anywhere from like $100 to $500 for these kinds of programs. And the sales process is typically done either one-to-one just to get started if you're having like a low volume of people coming in and expressing interest, which I highly recommend doing to get started is just to understand how to sell these things. It's really important to get on a call with somebody, at least a few people to understand their buying process. Lyric Kinard (25:37.558) We talked about that earlier with list building and finding friends and I have done this and can vouch for how valuable it is. Even if you only have like 20 people on your list that you know, get on Zoom with five of them and start asking them what they're looking for. What are their problems? What are their questions? And have a back and forth of trying to figure out how you can best serve them. And you'll hear the words that you need to use in your marketing, but also you'll understand what their real needs are instead of, you know, I have this thing, I know everything, here you should take it. Aaron From Thinkific (26:19.535) Yeah, I totally agree. It's incredibly important to get that one-on-one feedback from your audience. Coming back to audience centricity, it's the most important thing. The reason I see most people fail is because they're not being audience centric. They're making assumptions. They are not talking to their audience. They're not talking with their audience when it comes to their marketing language that they're using, the language on their sales page. Lyric Kinard (26:45.399) They're putting themselves at the center as the hero of the story when really the customer is the hero on a quest, right? We're Obi-Wan, they're Luke Skywalker, right? Aaron From Thinkific (26:53.798) Yes. Exactly, yeah, we actually in the accelerator program, we touch on the hero's journey, we teach the hero's journey to anyone who doesn't already know it, but yeah, it's so important. so. Lyric Kinard (27:08.949) Okay, I sidetracked us. Let's get back to where we were with what successful people do. So now they're talking to their customer. Aaron From Thinkific (27:17.849) Yeah, and so this is just to get started, by the way. So I'll kind of walk you through the stages, but you know, the most successful, we'll start with those mid-range entry level products. you know, specifically for the crafting group, we typically see a lot of people actually launch memberships eventually. So that would be kind of like the next stage is to offer something a little bit more recurring revenue where you are asking for monthly subscription or annual subscriptions. very similar to how software works, where you are going to be delivering value very regularly. So there are some really good examples here that I would love to share. So vintage show... Sorry? Oh, awesome, good. Yeah, so vintage sewing school is one that I would love to share with your audience. So this is Evelyn Wood and she has about a thousand members on her membership. I'm sure it's grown since we... Lyric Kinard (27:58.626) That'd be great. Go for it. Aaron From Thinkific (28:16.593) did a story on her, but Vintage Sewing School is a really great example. So this is a relatively low cost membership offer. And let me just grab the actual price here. So it's about $19 a month and you're getting kind of like an all access pass to all of Evelyn's courses. it very similarly, Mimi Goodwin, who's also a sewer with Sew It Academy has Lyric Kinard (28:36.62) Mm-hmm. Aaron From Thinkific (28:46.017) lots of different options now, but also ended up with a membership site. And so these sites have the potential to earn you like a very steady income every single month. But the catch is that this is a full-time business. This is gonna be your whole life and you're gonna be delivering value or having to deliver value to convince someone to keep their subscription every single pay period, whether it's annually or monthly. Lyric Kinard (29:10.221) That's the thing. That's the difference between creating an evergreen webinar, which can bring in revenue, but you have to work for every subscription, right? For every purchase and a membership, you are right. It's great, more stable income, but you have to create content regularly all the time. So think to yourself if that aligns with what you want your business to look like. It doesn't have to be difficult. You don't have to create a whole new course every month, right? What are some of the ideas that you have for memberships? Because we are... thinking in our mind right now about an audience of educators who want to build workshops, but memberships are a thing that could happen with designers or shops, especially shops. have a brick and mortar location. You are bound by geography, but these kind of ideas can expand your community far beyond the people who can just drive to where you are if you offer them value. So what kind of things could a shop owner create with a membership? Aaron From Thinkific (30:25.829) Yeah, so typically what we see work really well in these memberships are, you know, shorter, more like kind of mini course style things. And so that's when you kind of transition away from those higher priced courses. So, you know, I mentioned a price range earlier of like a hundred to five hundred dollars. Typically, you know, a la carte, these courses in the membership will be a lot cheaper. So they might be twenty dollar courses. They might be thirty dollar courses, but. Lyric Kinard (30:42.743) Mm-hmm. Aaron From Thinkific (30:53.233) You get access to all of them. You get access to 10, 15, 20, 50 of these courses in a membership for the same price as one of them. So, you know, and people really never run out of content when you have that much to go on. And you can also put some other really good bonuses in there, like, you know, maybe weekly sessions where we come together to show what we've been working on for feedback. Lyric Kinard (31:08.778) Nice. Aaron From Thinkific (31:18.267) You can do this asynchronously in a community space as well to make it a little bit easier on yourself. And so these kinds of memberships are really great. If you have a brick and mortar store, it's a really great option for people who are your best customers, who might be coming in regularly to attend workshops, those kinds of things. They can keep access to recordings of things or maybe download templates or something like that after the fact. So if somebody's paying for a workshop every month, then maybe offer a membership where they have some digital benefits as well as some in-person benefits. Lyric Kinard (31:52.864) Right. I actually lectured for a shop via Zoom. just hosted, she hosted a Zoom meeting and it was for her, it was her points system reward. They got to come to this live lecture with me and it was a fantastic perk and she has this kind of membership that There were just so many great things, ways she built an amazing community outside of the people who could walk in. Aaron From Thinkific (32:26.661) Yeah, it's wonderful. And the best part is, is if you record everything, then you have that content forever in your membership and it just makes it more and more valuable. You know, how you're describing it on the sales page gets better and better. have, you know, all the courses and all the recordings of the workshops, but then you also have all the recordings of all these experts like Lyric coming in and then you can keep that building forward with live workshops, access to those, and it's kind of a special benefit. Lyric Kinard (32:53.729) Does Thinkific have integrations within the platform so that you can set up a live event and they have to log into the membership and then hop on Zoom or whatever live thing is happening? Aaron From Thinkific (33:07.579) Yeah, exactly. So we don't do the actual video hosting. We'll leave that to Zoom, which everybody has, loves, and knows. But you will be able to set up any kind of ticketing system on Thinkific for these kinds of events. You can include it in the courses or the memberships. And then have it secure to just the members as well, like you mentioned. Lyric Kinard (33:29.901) Excellent. Very cool. Is there anything else you can think of that successful entrepreneurs, business people do with Thinkific? Aaron From Thinkific (33:41.711) Yeah, think a lot of the times one of the biggest concerns for people just coming in on the platform have, especially in industries like this where, you know, really there's a lot of opportunities, but it might not feel like that just because there are websites out there that have a ton of education on them or YouTube channels that have millions of subscribers, those kinds of things. The best, most successful people on Thinkific just be themselves when it comes to their content marketing, when it comes to their products. And I'll give you an example from another industry. there's a lot of people out there who teach Excel, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. There's tons. You can look it up anywhere. It's on every course marketplace. It's on every YouTube channel, everywhere. But Miss Excel, her name is Kat Norton. You can search Miss Excel like M-I-S-S. Kat Norton did it herself in her own way. So over COVID, she started producing some fun TikToks about different types of like hacks that you can do in Excel. And she would basically just dance and talk and show through like, know, screenshots or screen recordings of herself doing cool stuff in Excel in bite-sized amounts. And that... snowballed into her teaching Excel courses and selling Excel courses from her social media channels. And now she's got multi-seven figure business. She's teaching, you know, large companies, all their teams, how to use, how to leverage Microsoft Office as much as they can. And it's just kind of like gotten, it gets bigger every time I talk to her essentially, which is really exciting. Lyric Kinard (35:27.629) And she probably doesn't have to wear a suit to do it. She gets to be herself. And we talk about this all the time, especially again, especially especially with AI. People don't want polished like Hollywood produced. They want real. They want connections with you. So even if there's 500 other people teaching the exact same thing that you teach, it's about the way they connect with you personally. Aaron From Thinkific (35:30.991) No. Lyric Kinard (35:56.066) the way that you're communicating. So be yourself, people. Be yourself. Be confident in who you are. You'll find the people. There's enough students out there for everybody. There really is. Aaron From Thinkific (36:07.077) Yeah, yeah, totally. And especially if you are part of a community that is typically underserved, that's a huge, huge thing. you know, different languages other than English, different types of people out there will gravitate to people that are like themselves. So if you know you're a part of a community like that, then really, you know, use that to your advantage. Put that out there, start serving a community that isn't being as served as other communities are. Lyric Kinard (36:14.839) Hmm. Lyric Kinard (36:35.571) Excellent, excellent. Do you have anything else that you can think of that you want to tell our audience and encourage them with? Aaron From Thinkific (36:46.437) Yeah, think outside of the kind of anxiety that there's other people out there and the competitors are doing it better, which hopefully we've gotten over right now, I think some of the other number one objections here are around perfectionism and getting everything perfect and looking as professional as you can. And I think that comes from a little bit of a doubt that you are qualified to do this. I think that... really watch out for perfectionism and imposter syndrome when you're getting started in this kind of thing. Because realistically, if you're just one step ahead of someone else and they want to learn from you, you should let them and you should get to your level on these things. Lyric Kinard (37:29.023) If you flip the script, if you stop thinking about yourself as what the video is about. and think of the gift that you're offering your student, it's about them. And really not showing up is depriving them of something. And that really helps to kind of get rid of the imposter syndrome. Like if you really needed something, you wouldn't care how perfectly the package was wrapped. You need the thing. Aaron From Thinkific (38:01.721) Yeah, exactly. And we can work on the packaging later. That's the point. It's about iteration. It's about experimentation. It's about failing and getting back up and doing better the next time. That is also a key to success that we see on Thinkific. It's about grit and resilience. And as long as you have those kinds of things working for you and you can have a growth mindset, then you will be successful. Lyric Kinard (38:06.89) It gets better. Lyric Kinard (38:29.129) I agree, absolutely. I kind of came on here expecting to talk more about technology and all the technical aspects of this. But this conversation about the heart of it all and how Thinkific centers that part of it, I think has been really, really valuable. Thank you so much for being with us, Erin. Aaron From Thinkific (38:53.041) Of course, yeah, it's my pleasure to be here. And if you wanted to reach out, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also email me. My email is just A-A-R-O-N-Aaron at thinkific.com. So just reach out whenever and we can have a chat. And I'd love if anyone is interested and wants to jump into that program, the Thinkific Accelerator program, you just keep an eye out for that on our website and you can sign up for a trial anytime to get access. Lyric Kinard (39:18.081) Fantastic. We'll get all those links and put them in the show notes in the descriptions as well. So my friends, go forth and conquer, right? Go forth and not even conquer, just stumble around, get it figured out and keep walking one step at a time forward because it really is that teacher's heart, that gift of service and love that you have for your people. So until next time, take care, my friends.

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