I've been doing more interviews this week for Course Builders TV and I'm now at the point where I'm beginning to look back at them to pick out common themes.

The first thing that absolutely jumps out is that everyone I've interviewed who's created a successful course has got something out of the door and into the hands of paying customers pretty quickly.

They've all – to a greater or lesser degree – gone down the path of creating something good but not perfect. Something customers can use to get the results they want, but that doesn't have all the bells and whistles that you might add to a final polished product.

In some cases that meant the technology was initially pretty basic. Or it was done as live calls before turning it into recorded videos.  Or it was a “minimum viable product” narrowly focused on the outcome of the course rather than on everything someone might want to learn.

My experience is that with an online course (and with a lot of marketing) you can get to good pretty quickly. It then takes you two or three times as long to make something 10% or 20% better.

And the reality is that you can never make it perfect on your own because you just don't have the feedback from paying clients you need to know exactly what to improve.

We all know this in theory of course.

I'm sure no one is reading this shaking their head saying “no, he's wrong, it's well worth spending twice as long to try to make something a tiny bit more perfect before letting customers near it”.

But the reality is that while most of us know this in theory, few of us live it in practice.

I'm forever tweaking my website and landing pages to make minor improvements only I will ever notice. I know people who've been working on books or online courses for months or even years without ever getting that first version into customers' hands. 

Yet all of us would nod in agreement with the concept that you need to get things shipped quickly.

Perhaps we need less agreement in theory, less nodding as we read emails like this, and more action to make it happen.