Online Course Tech Stack: It's Not That Easy

We copied all the FAQs from our YouTube comments and emails into Slite so that we can use your questions to create the course outline and content. We also used Slite to write V1 of the course.

Self explanatory! We wanted slides to add some structure around the course that anyone can follow. We also felt they elevated the course. We also used Figma for the background image used in the next tool…

Tella allowed us to record our camera + screen + slides and edit right within the app, giving the course a professional feel. All that said, we did run into some frustrations with editing and the app crashing, so it wasn't without stress 😅 You can read our full review here.

We didn't want yet another tool for a single landing page, so Alex built a page in Webflow (where our website is currently hosted). He did a good job, super happy with how it turned out! Check it out here.

Update: we've since switched to Polar for payments (we do not recommend using Lemon Squeezy since Stripe acquired them and they've been going down-hill).

We did not want to be locked into a course platform that took a fee on top of payment processing fees on top of a monthly subscription fee, all to just host a single video 😅 since Stripe now owns Lemon Squeezy and it's the platform they recommend you use for selling courses + we know of other SaaS companies doing $3M+/year using them (and are happy to pay their fees because they are merchant of record, so they handle all sales/VAT tax compliance and remittance), so we figured it was a good choice for us to scale any future digital product offerings.

Hosting a paid course on YouTube (for free) is pretty risky as all you need is 1 person to leak the unlisted video URL and there's no roping that back in! Vimeo (paid tier) on the other hand, allows you to have the video inaccessible unless embedded on a specific domain/subdomain, so no one is viewing this course unless they are logged in at courses.efficient.app — pretty cool, right?

THIS took forever to figure out. Our course is simple: 4 modules, in a single, one-hour video, and many platforms out there offered way too many features (many module uploads, community, workbooks, etc). We simply just needed a solution that allowed us to embed the course from Vimeo, but handle all of the authentication/access side of things.

Since we're a software review and comparison site, we felt this would be a great opportunity to give Softr a shot as Alex has been wanting to play with it in a real-world use-case for a while now.

We actually reached out to them about and they said while it wasn't their ideal use-case, explaining that it could get quite expensive due to their per-seat pricing model (each course member would count as a seat), we felt it would be a good opportunity to give Softr a shot.

So while we don't recommend you follow how we used it for courses (see the full Softr review for where we do recommend it), we were surprised by how well the user login/authentication worked alongside its seamless integration with Airtable as the main database.

We could get away with this though as it was just meant to be a temporary solution while we build out our new site (while evaluating new software), as we're going to be moving the course over to our own infrastructure (and authentication) when we launch later this year. 🤞

We needed a single-source-of-truth for those eligible for the course (those who used our affiliate link, and those who paid for it). That's where good-ol Airtable comes in. While it was tempting to just use our CRM (Copper) as the single-source of truth, we needed something that integrated deeply with Softr out of the box (and in treating it as a standalone product, we believed it should be mostly separate from our CRM data).

So we used Airtable, and just had a CRM lookup at one point in the process to ensure that the person existed in our CRM before sending over the course. For that though, we needed to build a custom integration!

Y'all, Alex is an integration wizard! I want to give him a massive shoutout here. We have Zapier integrations going from Lemon Squeezy to Airtable to Softr (Softr & Airtable connect natively like peanut butter and jelly) for when someone purchases the course AND we have integrations between PartnerStack (affiliate tracking software) + Airtable + Copper (checking that the deal form was submitted) + Softr for when someone uses our affiliate link to purchase Motion.

We literally got PartnerStack to update their API for us to do this, would you believe we were the first to ever request being able to do this? 🤯 so yeah... Turns out giving away a course when someone uses your affiliate link and purchases a tool is not an easy feat! In full disclosure, Alex basically built an entire product here 😅

We send all of our emails via Loops! We LOVE the UI/UX of Loops for writing emails. We actually enjoy writing newsletters like this one, because their editor is super modern and slick, unlike most other email marketing text editors 😅 That said, they are still missing some core marketing features we'd love to see one day (e.g. showing us which links in our newsletter were clicked).