Hope this New Year is treating you well. I have some big plans and tons of new content I want to share with you this year about building online courses.

But today I want to focus on something that's been bugging me for a while. A kind of paradox if you like.

In my interviews with successful course builders I always close by asking them for one big tip they would give to a friend thinking about creating an online course that would most help them succeed.

Two themes have come up time and time again.

One is speed.

You never really know if a course is going to click with your audience until you offer it for sale. And you never know exactly what they want until you show them something and get feedback on it.

So one of the biggest keys to success is to get a minimum viable version of your course out there quickly, offer it for sale and get feedback on it. Don't wait until you've perfected it or got all the bells and whistles or a super polished presentation.

But the second big theme is quality.

With an online course, you're not just competing with local competitors. Your course buyers could (and often do) buy from anyone in the world.

Your course needs to stand out and be brilliant quality to succeed in a harsh red ocean of other courses.

And, of course, it seems like there's a trade-off between these two themes.

On the one hand, you need to pull your course together quickly and get it out to your audience to get feedback.

On the other, you need to ensure it's super high quality to stand out against all the competition.

This really bugged me at first.

Did I have to sacrifice one for the other? Or find some kind of happy medium trade-off? Or was one of the themes simply wrong.

But eventually, I realised that there's no trade-off at all…if you think more deeply about what quality means.

As a course creator spending all your time building a course it's easy to assume that quality means the production values of the course…

…an impressive website. High-quality videos. Forums, certificates, gamification, the whole learning management kit and kaboodle.

But that's not what the vast majority of your actual clients care about.

They care about getting results from the course. Fast.

Of course, if the website is super slow and they can't understand what the videos are telling them then they're not going to learn effectively and they won't get results from your course.

But as long as the production values are OK, what's really important is the effectiveness and practicality of what you teach.

Powerful ideas. Simple plans that work. Shortcuts.

You can get these across without investing a small fortune or slaving away for months over a fancy website.

Quick, practical videos. Templates. Copy and paste examples. Live sessions where you answer questions. Nothing that takes an age or needs super high production values.

But super valuable.

So if you're getting bogged down creating your course and it's taking ages, think to yourself “what do my best customers actually want from this course? What's quality to them?”

– Ian

PS – I very often find that when faced with a painful trade-off or two goals seemingly in conflict, there's often a hidden assumption buried in there that just isn't true (in this case that “quality” means high production values).

Look for those assumptions. Challenge them. And you just might find.a way to have your cake and eat it.