Online Course Tech Stack: It's Not That Easy

Online Course Tech Stack: It's Not That Easy

Written by A-Team
(trust is important to us)

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Last Updated:

Nov 20, 2024

You would think with the hundreds of course platforms popping up everywhere that hosting and distributing a course would be easy peasy these days. That was not our experience 😅

Granted, our situation was slightly unique. We wanted to be able to give the course away for free to anyone that used our affiliate link to sign up.

This introduced complications because the course in some cases is a bonus offer, and we aren't charging everyone for it.

Why not Teachable?

Teachable (or similar course platforms) is what is often recommended first for hosting/selling courses but we were underwhelmed by the solution.

Let us explain.

We have a very simple course (4 modules, roughly 1 hour altogether) and what we were mainly looking for was a platform that could easily host our course securely.

Our course is for folks to purchase, but we also give it away for free as a promotion to anyone who uses our affiliate link to purchase Motion (this way Motion is essentially paying for the content).

With that, we wanted an easy way to provide the course for free, without compromising on the securely facets (e.g. we didn't want a coupon code for others to be able to share it online).

Teachable and all these course platforms are over-engineered for what we need. They are built around separate videos and write-ups for modules and working through longer courses.

Alex knew he wanted us to use Lemon Squeezy because they have affiliate baked in (for the future), and they are as barebones of a payment gateway as it gets, and now Stripe owns them.

Lemon Squeezy charges a total of 5% and they are merchant of record. With that, they take care of all of our sales tax compliance, which we knew we absolutely wanted (years ago, we were re-selling software and we needed to deal with sales tax which was a nightmare for a small business like ours... well honestly, it's a nightmare for any business) 😅

Not only was Teachable not exactly what we were looking for, they also charge 5% + if you don't use their payment gateway, it'd be an additional 2.9% + $.30 (on their $39/month tier). Or you can pay $120/month subscription and they remove the 5% fee, but you're still paying the payment gateway fees.

At the end of the day, we're just trying to securely host a single video and for us, tying ourselves so deeply with Teachable + their preferred payment processor was not... appealing.

Not only that, but we're currently in the process of custom building our website where we will have log-in accounts, so whatever solution we were looking for was only temporary (4-6 months).

So, with knowing we were NOT going to use Teachable or a similar course software, here is the entire course stack we landed on.

Our Course Software Stack

📝 Slite for Ideation

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.

🎨 Figma for Slides

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 for Recording & Editing

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.

🖥️ Webflow for our Landing Page‍

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.

🍋 Lemon Squeezy for Payments

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.

📼 Vimeo for Video Hosting

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?

🔐 Softr for Course Embed + User Login

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.

We ultimately landed on using Softr, but it's hard to recommend them for this specific use-case (one-time purchase course without community) as their pricing gets out-of-hand with charging up-to $1/mo/course member (that's right, we're going to give them this feedback though, think they will be open to hearing it).

We actually reached out to them as Alex has wanted to play with Softr for a long time now and he felt this would be the perfect use-case. They kindly offered us a free account for a few months—great for us, but we can't confidently recommend this solution to others in good conscious at the moment 😅 Maybe if they take our feedback and change their pricing... keep you updated! We're planning on moving our course over to our new site (and authentication there) when we launch in the new year.

💿 Airtable for Database

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!

⚡ Zapier for Integrations

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 😅

✉️ Loops for Email Marketing

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).