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As I prepare to open the doors for the third time for The Creative Educator Academy, I’ve been reflecting on the journey that has brought me here and how much I’ve grown since the initial launch. In this episode of the podcast, I’m sharing all about where the idea of The Creative Educator Academy came from, how I approached creating a course, and the experience I’ve had with live-launching!
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Show Notes:
The Idea of The Creative Educator Academy (2:05)
Idea to Action (3:10)
Creating the Content (4:47)
Pitched to Invitation-Only Paid Beta Members (6:08)
Tweaked Content (6:54)
Live Launch (7:01)
What Stood in My Way (7:35)
Technology
Don’t Doubt Yourself
Launching (9:53)
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Links:
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Review the Transcript:
Welcome to so here’s the thing where we share candid conversations that lift the veil on what it takes to find success, even if that means sharing a few unpopular opinions. I’m your host Laylee Emadi, grab some coffee or cocktail. And let’s get real.
Hello friends, I am so excited to share this episode with you. It’s something that I’ve never done on here, but that I think you’ll find helpful, because I personally love when people share how they created the pieces inside of their businesses. And so I’m going to be sharing with you behind the scenes of the making of the creative educator Academy, which is my signature course, where I help creative entrepreneurs step into the position of creative educator inside their industries. So from where the ideas started to all the doubts that I had, to the successes that I saw. And as we’re getting ready to reopen doors to the Academy, I wanted to share it all with you.
I love when creators take the time to really share the transparent and real and raw journeys that they have to create whatever it is that they’re doing. And so I’m excited to the same. Now before we dive in, I wanted to invite you to my free upcoming masterclass, that’s happening next week, where I’m teaching how to confidently step into the role of industry educator, while creating consistent income. It is happening on September 30. And you can grab your spot at the creative educator academy.com. Now this class is for you, if you’re a growing course creator, an up and coming speaker, a mentor or coach or an aspiring creative educator, maybe you really just want to learn how to share your gifts with your industry. And I’m going to be talking you guys through some mistakes that I see a lot of educators make and a lot more. So I’m hoping to see you there.
Don’t forget to visit the creative educator academy.com to grab your spot inside the class. Okay, here we go. We’re going to talk all things behind the scenes of the making of the creative educator Academy. As most of these stories go, it all started with a conversation with a friend and mentor of mine at the time, Natalie Frank. Now you guys might know Natalie, as one of the founders of the rising tide society as the author of Bigtable lung, you probably know Natalie from honeybook as their head of community. But at the time, she was my mentor. And now she’s just a great friend. And the Academy was actually her idea. I don’t know if I give her credit enough for this. At the time, we were kind of gauging where I wanted to go with my education inside of the creative industry. And she just kept saying, you know, people like me, she would say at the time, people like me, who don’t have formal education training, really might struggle with where to go, what to do, how to create lesson plans, how to create curriculum, and you could step in and teach educators how to teach. And I sat on that idea, I held on to that idea for way longer than I should have full disclosure, it took a really long time for me to go from idea to action.
So if you have an idea that you’re sitting on, let this be a lesson to you. This is kind of a side note, I want you to act on that idea. Don’t let doubts cloud your mind, don’t let self doubt or imposter syndrome. stand in your way. I had never created a course. At that time, I had never taken education on how to create a course of digital course an online course at that time. And of course, if I could go back in time, I would change that I would take a course that taught me how to create things I would, you know, I would invest in maybe a coach who could walk me through the process where I would just jump in and not sit on the idea for Gosh, I think it was maybe a year and a half to two years that I heard that idea. I love the idea. And I just sat on it for way longer than I should have. So that is my side note to you a little encouragement that if you are listening to this because you really want to create a course or you really want to launch some kind of education or some kind of offering and you have a great idea about it. Please take action, take action on it. Now.
Don’t wait another day. So Alright, let’s dive back into the making of I want to get into the nitty gritty. I know a lot of you guys who are listening to this, maybe you want to create something in your life. I have no idea where to start. Of course shameless plug here. I mean, I would start with the creative educator Academy because I teach in depth how to do all of this there. But I’m going to give you guys like a rundown of everything that I did and how I thought it went. So I started with creating the content now. This is kind of an industry trend to tell a lot of budding and up and coming educators. Hey, you should pre launch usually just grab some beta students and create the content at the same time that they are taking the content. And just like, do it as you go. I personally don’t love that concept. I don’t really love that advice. However, I do see that there’s value in it for people who maybe sit on ideas for a really long time. I personally don’t do my best work when I’m backed into a corner. And I also am not willing to take the risk of something standing or getting in my way. I think in the past year and a half, we’ve all seen what can happen when unpredictable things come up in our businesses, I know that there were several times this past year where I either got really sick, and I had to take time off of work. And my business didn’t suffer for it. But if I had promised people content, I would have had to either work through my sickness or disappoint those people.
And so I that’s my two cents on how I feel about if you should start by pre launching, start by getting beta students or start by creating content, I would start by creating content. So I created the content, and then I pitched it to them, invitation only paid beta members. Now these were up and coming educators who I knew really had a knack for education. They wanted to share their information, they wanted to share their knowledge. But they had no idea how to go about doing that. And so knowing them, I reached out and I said, Hey, I am coming out with this course that I think is going to be incredible. It’s called the creative educator Academy. And it’s going to be all about how to actually convey your education, your information to make sure that it’s impactful, and then actually creates transformation for your students. Do you want to be a paid beta member, and I quickly filled my beta spots, it was really exciting. And I took them through, took their advice, changed content, tweaked things, updated things. And then I started my live launch. So there is a lot of nitty gritty that goes into launching a course, creating a course putting it into a chosen course platform, researching course platforms, all of those things, I could probably talk about this for a really long time. And I actually do teach about this for a really long time.
Obviously, as I teach on course creation. However, I know that you guys come here for a bite sized episodes. So I’m just gonna say this in terms of the actual creation of the course and the behind the scenes, the few probably things that I want to share the most that stood in my way, were not things that actually mattered. In the end, they were things like tech, let me tell you, we did an episode here with Meghan Martin, I highly suggest if you didn’t listen to it, to go back and listen to it about how over professionalizing content stands in the way of a lot of amazing entrepreneurs and educators. And that really did stand in my way, I was nervous that if I didn’t hire a videographer, things would go really poorly. And in fact, I did bring on a videographer. And I ended up scrapping almost everything that she she made for me because as I updated my content and my education, I found that people didn’t really care if it was professionally edited, they cared about the content, they wanted amazing, incredible transformation, creating content. And so that is the one thing that I really wanted to share is don’t let the fear of tech stand in your way, get a webcam, get a mic. In fact, I have a resources page on my website. It’s layli emadi.com, slash resources. And they list out the microphone and the webcam that I use, pick them up on Amazon and get moving. So don’t let the tech scare you. And the second thing that I wanted to share in terms of the actual creation of the course, is don’t overcomplicate things, a lot of times we tend to start creating content, and then we start reading it back. And we think, well, this is common sense, or everybody has to know this. But that’s just not true. It’s one of those things as educators, you are the expert in your field, you are the expert at whatever it is that you’re teaching.
And so if you’re creating education around it, you’re probably going to start thinking to yourself, this is not high enough knowledge to be selling to be sharing, but you have to remember who is it that’s taking your education? Do they have the knowledge that you have? they likely don’t, and that’s why they’re purchasing your education. So don’t overthink it. Don’t overcomplicate it, teach to somebody who doesn’t have the knowledge that you have. Alright, those are two of the behind the scenes things that really stood in my way and I hope that this helps you kind of move past them. Now, let’s talk lunching. I made so many mistakes in my lunch, but I wanted to share a couple of things that went really really well for me, as I mentioned, I did a paid beta. And I let those beta members become affiliates for my live launch. I think that word of mouth and the testimonials that people who have actually taken your education, those words that they share, hold so much more weight and so much more power than anything like ads or anything, like just, you know, your everyday affiliate. Now, I love affiliate marketing, I think it’s a really smart way to work. And I think it’s great, but I think having alumni, people who have taken your course any of your beta members who can actually speak to the transformation that occurred when they took your education now that is priceless. So I let them be affiliates. And I think that really helped the live launch, pick up and create success. I did my very first founding member live launch after my beta group. And we had a five figure launch.
Now that was way more than I anticipated. Having never ever released a course, I wanted to manage my expectations. And I do think that if I’m sharing behind the scenes with you guys, the one thing that I really would encourage you is to be realistic with how much you’re going to make on your first lunch. Now, I don’t think you should be hopeless, I think you should definitely have, you know, good, better best goals that set you up for attainable numbers and attainable goals, but also allow you to dream big a little bit. So I really would encourage you to do that. Now, if I had created good, better best goals, for my first live launch, I still probably wouldn’t have even put where I ended as my best. So that was amazing. But after that, I closed the doors. And I didn’t actually reopen them for way longer than I probably should have. So as I’m getting ready to reopen the doors to the Academy, now, I realized that there was quite a lag in in the last time that I launched it the time that I’m opening doors now. And there was quite a lag from the first launch to the second launch. I’m now on my third round of opening doors to the Academy. And both times I probably waited a little bit longer than I should. And the reason that I did this, if I’m being fully transparent, is because as you guys know, I am a multi passionate entrepreneur, I do coaching, I have a mastermind, I have this podcast. And at the time in the past couple of years while it’s dwindled down, and I’ve really stepped a little bit further away from it, I also had a very, very busy and thriving photography business.
And so luckily now I’m kind of adjusting to the concept of scaling back in certain areas of my business, or my businesses so that I can really feed into the other parts of my business that need it. But that is something I wanted to share with you guys that I thought you could take away and really be aware of is it is hard to run multiple businesses at once. It’s not impossible. But as I always say, and as if you’ve been a longtime listener, you’ve heard me say many times, I believe that we can all do it all. I just don’t believe that we can do it all at the same time. And so because of that there was quite a lag and quite a gap between my opening doors to the Academy. Now I’m, as I mentioned, super excited to be opening doors again. And full transparency that is kicking off with the free masterclass that I mentioned earlier. As I said, if you’re interested, you can go to the creative educator Academy calm and grab one of the spots for the live class, or just sign up and you’ll get the replay. But I’m kicking off with the masterclass or a webinar, one thing I wanted to share in the making of behind the scenes of the creative educator Academy because again, full transparency, if I could go back in time, I would have always done it this way. What I did during my first live launch was actually a five day challenge.
Now a five day challenge was a really great way to grow my email list to gain interest of people who were potentially great fits for the Academy. However, I have seen that the conversion rate of learning from somebody in a masterclass or webinar, it just converts much higher. And I think the reason is because you get a chance to sit in on a class with these, this educator for, you know, 40 minutes to an hour and really see how they teach and see if that’s something that resonates with you and see if that’s something that excites you. And you can see if that is an educator that you really relate to, or that you look up to or that you enjoy learning from. And so once you do that, I think it is a lot easier to kind of get people to trust that the education that you’re creating for them and that you’re giving them on the other side of the offer at the end of the webinar or the masterclass it’s going to be something that can really truly provide transformation and amazing impactful things in their lives. So that’s something I wanted to share with you guys to the challenge was great. I love doing challenges. I will probably do a five day challenge again in the future, but I likely won’t ever do it again, in order to reopen doors to my course. I personally think that the webinar or masterclass, whatever you want to call it is probably the best way to do a kickoff have a launch of something like a course where people need to know what it’s like to actually learn from you. So that is the behind the scenes of the making of and the launch of my course the creative educator Academy.
I have said that phrase so many times in this episode. Thanks for sticking around, while I repeated the name of my course 400 times. But I am so excited, again to be opening doors and I’m also really excited to have shared all of this transparency with you guys. Hope you don’t judge me too harshly for my mistakes and just know that if you are in the process of going from idea to action, I am in your corner, I know what it’s like to have an idea and to sit on it for far too long. And I hope that this pushes you forward and shows you that we are all just figuring it out. The first time you do anything you probably don’t know what you’re doing and that is okay. As I mentioned before, grab a coach, take a course do something that helps you move yourself forward and stop holding yourself back. You have got this and I am so excited to see you on the next episode. Hey guys, I hope you loved that episode I wanted to remind you about the free masterclass at the creative educator academy.com this is happening on September 30. And if you are a course creator and aspiring course creator, mentor, coach or speaker, I hope to see you there.
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