Test my course as a student before I sell it
You have watched your own lessons a hundred times in the builder. Your student never will. They meet an email, a link, a first video and a menu - and if any of those is confusing, they do not write and tell you, they just go quiet.
So walk it yourself first, before a price is set and before a single person pays. It takes twenty minutes and it is the cheapest quality check in teaching.
How it works
- Close the public door. On the course's own page, set the door to by invitation only. There is no self-serve signup while it is set that way, so nobody wanders in halfway through your testing. Free and paid doors can wait (Sell a course from my own website, Give a course away free to grow my list).
- Publish the course and approve the draft. The lessons draft privately until you publish, and reach your real site when you approve. A sign-in link cannot open a course that was never published, so this step comes before the walk, not after it.
- Enrol yourself. Ask bernard to enrol you, or a colleague, using a real email address - the same thing he does for a student who paid you by bank transfer (Enrol a student myself - they paid elsewhere). Nothing is different about it: the enrolment is recorded and the welcome email goes out.
- Walk the whole thing, on your phone. Open the email, tap the link, and go through the course lesson by lesson: the videos, the written notes, the worksheets, the next-lesson button, the page that remembers where you got to (Let learners in without accounts or passwords). Read the welcome email properly while you are there - it is the first thing every student sees.
- Fix what annoyed you, then open the door. Whatever irritated you will irritate every student you ever have. Change it, then switch the course to free or paid and connect payouts if you are charging (Where the money goes when someone enrols).
Test the public half too
A student's first experience is not the welcome email - it is your course page while they are still deciding. So sign out (or use a private browser window) and look at the page a stranger sees: the summary, the syllabus, the price, and the one lesson you have marked free to watch (Let people watch one lesson free). That taster is doing the selling, so watch it the whole way through as if you had never met you.
Testing with somebody else
Better still, enrol one honest person - a colleague, a past client, the friend who tells you the truth. They will trip over things you cannot see any more, because you know where everything is. Enrol them the same way, ask them to say every place they hesitated, and take the list seriously.
Their enrolment is a real one, so it appears in your enrolments list like any other. Ending it later is straightforward, and nothing about the course itself changes when you do.
The prompt
“Set my [course name] course to invitation only, then enrol [your email address] on it so I can walk it as a student before I sell it.”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- How do I preview my course as a student before selling it?
- Close the public door first: set the course to invitation only, so nobody can enrol themselves while you work. Then ask bernard to enrol you with a real email address. You get the same welcome email and sign-in link a paying student gets, and you can walk every lesson exactly as they will.
- Do I need to publish the course to test it?
- Yes, for the full walk. You can be enrolled on a draft course, but the sign-in link only opens once the course is published - and a published course reaches your real site only when you approve the draft, so approve it, test it, and change anything you don't like before you tell a soul.
- Can I test it without setting up payments?
- Yes, and that's the point of doing it in this order. An invitation-only course needs no price and no payment account at all, so you can prove the whole experience works and only connect payouts once you're happy with it.
- Will testing it send emails to my real students?
- No. Enrolling yourself emails you, nobody else. Nothing about the course changes, so there is nothing to approve, and existing students are untouched.
- What should I actually be looking for?
- The things a student meets and you never do: does the welcome email make sense, does the first lesson play on a phone, are the worksheets attached to the right lessons, does the next lesson come up when one ends, and does the free taster show your teaching at its best.