Surprisingly, most of the course creators that I encounter never talk to customers.

At this stage you need to take a step back and spend some time with the people you’re trying to serve.

In this phase, the unlock is curiosity.

When you take the time to ask very specific questions about the value they get out of your course and discover their buying triggers, your course and your marketing take on a new life.

As you begin to formulate new ideas for how you want your course to change, then you need to spend time with a small group of people presenting your new ideas and getting direct feedback.

This is a golden opportunity for you because this direct interaction tells you if your program works the way you expect, if it's communicated effectively, and the most important question… it answers whether or not you have market validation.

The milestone for this phase is often to pre-sell access to your course, because true validation doesn’t happen until money changes hands.

Now it’s time to get creative! Now that you’re crystal clear on how your course is evolving, it’s time to design everything from the content to your new offer structure.

This is where you’re spending time figuring out the right structure for your course, building a custom vocabulary, crafting frameworks and mechanisms unique to your brand, and modeling your funnel.

It’s all about knowing where you’re headed, and where your customer is going.

Once you know the customer journey then you can get concrete. You start to figure out exactly what actions you need to take and what targets you need to hit to boost your profits.

The milestone here is a detailed course outline and a preliminary marketing plan where your launch begins to take shape.

The Build stage is all about determination.

Here, your focus is on crafting the best customer experience possible. Your job is to become a master at guiding attention and getting results for your students. This is the phase where you build slides, write the scripts, and figure out how you’re going to present on camera.

As you enter the recording, editing, and packaging phase, your course starts to become real.

The milestone for this phase is a fully recorded course that’s uploaded onto your publishing platform.

The launch phase is where your patience is put to the test. Rather than just shouting to anyone who’ll listen, you need to get strategic. By picking a preliminary launch date you can begin to create a launch work-back schedule. Here, you see how your timing fits the market and what your messaging needs to say. You decide how long of a launch window you want and figure out what sort of a launch model you need.

In this phase you also write your sales pages, launch emails, and build your promotion strategies.

It’s all about mounting excitement for what’s to come. The milestone here is a successful launch and growing course sales while you sleep.

In the final reinforcement phase, the key discipline is empathy. The relationship with your customer only begins at the course sale. During this phase you focus on customer service, collecting testimonials, and finding ways to improve your course yet again.

Or maybe even see new opportunities emerge.

You’ll often find ways to serve your customers better through new courses and new offerings..

Which conveniently brings us right back to the validation stage once again.