What's the best platform to host my courses if I already have an audience?

General Forum
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I’m going to create an online video course (maybe several) and am a bit stumped as to which platform to use to host them. There’s two types to choose from.

  1. Udemy/Skillshare - Hosted on their platform with millions of existing users. They do a lot of the marketing and may have random people find the course through search, but they take a big cut.
  2. Thinkific/Kajabi - Self hosted, more complex course creation options. There’s no existing audience and a hefty monthly fee to pay but I keep all profits.

I’m leaning towards the second option as I already have a 35K YouTube channel, a few facebook groups and a website in the same niche. It seem like I wouldn’t need the marketing push that Udemy provides, which is the main reason to use them.

On the other my courses would likely be priced around $40-50 as I need them to be accessible to consumers. The course would be something similar to teaching people how to shoot and edit with a DSLR (just an analogy - but the course is about teaching people to use a consumer product). Probably around 3-4 hours in length and others even shorter. It seems most self hosted courses are longer and more expensive then this.

This is my first foray into courses so would appreciate any insight.

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You could use Wordpress and LearnDash and it and run it on a cheap $2 a month shared hosting

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Is that complex to set up and integrate payment and memberships etc? The self hosted platforms do seem like they make.it all very easy

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Never mind there’s definitely plenty of YouTube tutorials to learn from.

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LearnDash integrates with WooCommerce and Stripe as payment options. Should be relatively easy to set up.

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OP - Did you settle on a course provider? I’m evaluating whether to go with Kajabi or Thinkific at the moment so would love to hear what you went with!

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What did you ended up doing ?

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I went with Thinkific. I don’t think I heard any negative reviews of Kajabi but, in the spirit of MVP, I used Thinkific bc it’s slightly cheaper and it seemed to have the features I felt would be useful.

In the long run, the course will help me realize what I actually need vs don’t need, and I figure I can course correct as needed

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I am also looking into course platforms. But reagrdles, the number of them is huge and I actually want to know if anyone found a good Learning Management System which lets the creator host the courses (not just sell them), and that can password protect and give access to users only access to specific paid courses?