S
tart today. This is the ad-
vice I always give new
course creators when they
find CourseCraft. They sign up for
an account, check out the fea-
tures, read some blog posts and
think “Ok, I’ll start working on my
e-course when I can afford a bet-
ter camera” or “I just need to get
through this busy time and then
I’ll launch my course.” But you
know what? They almost never do.
CourseCraft is an easy to use
e-course platform for creative en-
trepreneurs. When I started it in
2012, I had a laptop, a full-time job,
a dad fighting cancer, a software
developer husband and a very
clear idea of what I wanted. At the
time, there was almost nothing like
it on the internet. If you wanted to
create an e-course you had to build
it yourself using an army of Word-
press plugins. It would have been
really easy for me to keep putting
off my little side-project until it
was a better time. But I just kept
sketching out pages of the appli-
cation in my notebook and arguing
about the design with my husband.
And it worked! We launched with
seriously bare bones features.
Our first few users were ambi-
tious people and luckily for us very
talkative. We got to custom build
the application for them. Launch-
ing before we were really ready
has helped us keep CourseCraft
easy to use. We could have spent
years creating every feature we
could think of, ending up with a
bloated, slow-moving beast of
a website. And even worse -
with no feedback from the peo-
ple who would eventually use it!
Today I have a toddler, very lit-
tle free time, a messy house and
a million other projects trying to
pull my attention away. But it’s still
important for me to keep the same
mindset I had at the beginning.
Work with what I have today and
make adjustments along the way.
There’s something that I’ve begun
to realize too. The limitations with
which we built CourseCraft is ac-
tually what makes CourseCraft
so awesome. We’re not funded
by millionaire angel investors, we
don’t have a huge team of people
and we like it that way. If I had to
answer to a board of directors, I
wouldn’t be able to answer sup-
port emails. If I had to manage a
team of people, I wouldn’t have
time to manage our Facebook
group. Being connected to the peo-
ple who use our site is what mat-
ters most to me and it’s something
that wouldn’t have happened at all
if I had kept putting off my dream.
So what can you do today to
make your dream come true?
Just start. Do something. Any-
thing. Work with what you have
and make course corrections as
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