Using Online Courses to Grow Your WooCommerce Business

Robbie: We’re really excited today. We’re going to talk about a subject that is near and dear to my heart, which is LMS’s and plus other things obviously, and all relating that to Woo. And by the way, I’m Robbie Adair. Should’ve introduced myself I suppose so you knew who you were even listening to here. And then my cohost is Robert Jacobi. Robert, who’ve we got on to talk to about this particular subject?

Robert: Oh, I’ve been waiting to talk to this person for a while, not that I haven’t seen him for weeks and weeks over the summer. Today we have Chris Lema VP of product development at Liquid Web, as well as the new GM of LearnDash. He’s a man of many hats, and if you could see him now, he’s got one on per usual. Welcome Chris.

Chris: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Robbie: Awesome. Well, Chris, and I know you’re very well versed, not just in that LMS, but others as well. So I think that you make an ideal candidate here to talk about this subject and as well as we know, you really know WooCommerce as well. So, let’s talk a little bit here about integrating your LMSs and WooCommerce. Now I know LearnDash has added a lot of features on their groups as well as even has added some e-commerce, but most people I still feel like, or myself and people that I know they’re using LearnDash, we still use WooCommerce for the e-commerce part of that, just because it opens us up to more things, correct?

So what is your take on, and I know you’re new to LearnDash as far as where the direction is going and all that, but do you see the e-commerce side of LearnDash growing more or just more ways that it works with WooCommerce going forward for e-commerce?

Chris: So I think the answer is exactly what you’d imagine, which is both. So we have segments who, customer segments who absolutely love and we would have to tear it out of their cold fingers if we tried to say, oh, you don’t need WooCommerce. They love WooCommerce. They love the integration with WooCommerce, because as you said, there’s so much you can do with it, right?

Hundreds of payment gateways all across the globe aren’t exactly what happens if you’re using PayPal or if you’re using Stripe, which we have support for natively, right? And so if you’re in one of those places where you need a custom payment gateway, or if you need other things, right? We support through partners, the ability to buy in bulk, but buying in bulk is only one model of putting a lot of people into a course. You also have the model of putting them into groups after they’ve enrolled, right? And so that’s with our group functionality, and that’s another approach, but there’s a third approach, right? Which is the, I offer a course and I say, here’s a one seat license. Here’s a five seat license. Here’s a 10 seat license, and there’s still one buyer, right?

And they’re buying a five seat or a 10 seat, and they want the process to work and WooCommerce does that better than just about anything, right? And so the ability to leverage WooCommerce, leverage subscriptions if you want to do installment payments, leverage membership if you want to protect not just the LMS, but protected areas of the website where you might have additional downloads or bonus videos or anything else, WooCommerce makes all of that very possible.

And so I don’t think there’s any doubt that we will continue to embrace and move forward with WooCommerce in the integrations there while at the same time evolving the platform for the segments that may not need payment at all, right? And so if you’re a corporate trainer, you’re not charging people for anything. You’re like, I set this up for my company and my employees should just log in and be able to take courses. And I don’t need anything that comes from an e-commerce part of the platform. And so we want to support all the segments that use LearnDash and all the ones that want to.

Robert: I mean, I love that you brought up the corporate segment. That’s actually where I got my feet wet in the whole internet sphere. And you actually even had a post about sort of the history of learning and your learning technology and your experiences with that probably about a month or two ago.

And it was great to see you mentioning standards like SCORM. And I remember even pre SCORM, it was AICC when it was just an aviation standard. And I love how those are kind of open standards. Now, you’re expanding upon that with open tools. I know you’re a person of many frameworks. What’s the LMS learning framework look like over the next let’s say three years?

Chris: Well, I think the thing that you got to embrace, and this is true for any space or industry, is that the world is changing and evolving, right? What we saw during COVID was a massive, massive growth in online learning across the board, not just LearnDash, everywhere. And high adoption and rapid adoption and pivots in organizations that at one point were doing physical events and suddenly changed them to online events and then turned them into online long-term academies, and then online courses and everything under the sun. Plus individual folks who were like, hey, I’m a domain expert and I just want to put my stuff online, right?

So we have domain experts that are creating courses. We have corporations that are doing online and corporate training. We have freelancers as well as agencies that are building a single course or a course marketplace. And all of those things are overtime adjusting. In the last year, year and a half, we saw a lot of movement.

I sat with a group of friends talking about where the education space was adjusting. This was before I knew that I was going to step into… That we were going to acquire, and then I would step into a different role with LearnDash. But about five months ago, right? I sat with Justin, who’s the co-founder and the former guy who ran LearnDash and I said, okay, you got the first phase of online learning, which is the universities just getting course stuff out the door, right? The MIT is the Stanford’s, all sorts of solutions that were just like, let’s take this and put it out, but they’re not looking to make money. They weren’t monetizing it. The instructors were already being paid because they were course instructors for the university. They weren’t trying to make a living on it. You have all phase one, right? And a lot of that was us trying to figure out the technology to make that even possible, right?

And then we move into phase two and in phase two, it was all about trying to make a platform that works for educators, right? Trying to create the ability to make it so they could make money. So how do you charge for things? And how do you spin up websites to sell it, right? And websites to host all your learning.

And so phase two was pretty long. And we went from the earliest of plugins, like LearnDash to hosted SaaS platforms like Teachable and Teachery and Thinkific, and eventually Podia. Now today SamCart, right? Everybody and their brother figuring out how to make it so that people who want to sell their skill can do that. But what we discovered in the midst of that was suddenly someone who is really good at calligraphy and could teach a really great course on calligraphy also had to be an internet marketer, also had to create landing pages, also had to create websites, also had to set up payment gateways, also had to have a Stripe account.

Also had to have an ability to do email marketing and marketing automation and tagging customers. And they’re like, I just knew calligraphy, how did I get into this space? And on the student side, what we’ve seen is dramatic adoption of buying the course and dramatic non-completion of a course, right? Your brain fires off a set of chemicals when you buy the course with the anticipation of the fact that you’re now going to have the course. So you get a dopamine hit just like you were in Vegas and doing the slot machine, you get a dopamine hit the moment you buy the course. And for most people, the domain hit is all they need and they’re done.

So they literally never log in, never take the course, never complete anything because they got the dopamine hit that they would have gotten when they completed it with the anticipation of the certificate. They got it when they bought it. I don’t know if you know people that buy books and then put it on their shelf, right? And then they walk back into a Barnes & Noble. And for some of your listeners, they may not know what a Barnes & Noble is, but it’s like Amazon but in a physical building.

Robert: Or what a book is.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. It’s like a PDF, but it’s actually printed. And so what happens is I sat with Justin five months ago and I just said, hey, the third wave of this online education is going to be cohort. It’s going to be community. We’re going to hear community, community, community everywhere. But what it really is, is about positive peer pressure. Positive peer pressure is the little text group that if Robert and I and 20, 50 other people are all at Cabo Press and someone texts and says, hey, I’m going to go for a run today. Now I may not go for the run and someone else may not go for the run, but there’s someone who reads that and goes, ah, I’m on the fence.

And then Robert goes, hey, I’m going to go for the run. And then someone else goes, oh, well, then if Robert’s going to go, then I’m going to go, right? And that positive peer pressure is the other side of the peer pressure game that our parents taught us about, right? If your friends are smoking, are you going to smoke? If your friends jump off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff? But they never talked about like, if your friends dress well, are you going to dress well? If your friends keep their rooms clean and you visit them and you’re like, wow, do you want to keep your room clean? There’s a positive side to peer pressure. And that’s what cohort based learning does, is it gets you in a little team where the team goes, hey, I finished my assignment. Oh, good, then I’m going to finish my assignment. Oh, I want to review your assignment. Can you review my assignment? But all of that is community. It’s engagement. It’s interaction. What we know is it drives completion.

And if you care about people getting to the end of something then the cohort stuff’s going to be important. So I think education is changing. Education online is changing. And I think we have to figure out how to keep doing the good things we’ve done, because there’s still going to be corporate rates training. There’s still going to be lots of other things, but also how do you embrace where the world moves and how do you support that? Right now, what you find is a lot of people that are building a course also have a Facebook group, also have a circle SO group, also have a buddy boss group, also have something like their slack group. They’re creating community somewhere else, right? And I think one of the questions has to be well, does it have to be somewhere else or can it be part of this? And so I think we’ll be looking at that question.

Robbie: I was going to say, but, oh, so this really, you’re literally talking, I feel like, right to me, Chris, is because with OS training, we’re working on our new site, right? And that literally our idea was the same thing. We see a lot of people who are setting up and they may take a course or they may take a lesson and then they don’t complete. And so that’s our new site has community built into it, called the OS Tribe. So it has community built in there because my thought was, I was like, there’s a lot of books I would have never, ever in a million years read if I wasn’t in a book club. So what if I was in a course club and we just all talked about this course? And so that’s where we were like, you do need that peer pressure as it were, I guess. We shouldn’t call that. We should call it peer support maybe instead of pressure, but it’s pressure really. Especially if Robert’s in the group.

Robert: Going back to, training’s always had that sort of carrot and stick moment, at least certainly in the enterprise where it’s like, oh, if you finish this course on Lotus Notes, if anyone in the audience remembers Lotus Notes, yeah, you’ll get to upgrade to the new version. Well, I’m fine with the old version, but IT has to upgrade across the enterprise. So now you’ll be locked out of your computer if you don’t actually complete the course. So there’s that adoption and completion has always been a huge, huge issue. And from the enterprise down to what you’re talking about, calligraphy.

I might think that taking calligraphy is the coolest thing I could do. Write some nice little letters for the holidays. So I get the course and then yeah, I fall asleep because I don’t have that sort of reminder or thing like, oh, by the way, you did pay a hundred bucks for this. You probably should actually figure it out.

Chris: Well, and here’s the thing is that the courses aren’t all costing a hundred bucks, right? So what happens is you have this wave of people that are offering incredible value, right? Here’s my six lesson course, plus three bonuses, plus two PDFs, plus a starter template pack, here’s everything you ever needed for $17 on an ad on Facebook, right? And so you buy it, but you buy it on a Saturday while you’re watching college football. And you’re like, oh. You’re scrolling and you’re like, that’s interesting. I’ve wanted to learn that. So you pay the $17, but the $17, it’s not a life commitment. So on Monday morning when I wake up and I get the six emails from them saying, here’s your login, here’s your password, here’s your onboarding, here’s your receipt.

Hey, this is the CEO and I’m just naturally writing you to tell you about all this stuff. And you’re like, no, you’re not. It’s an automated marketing campaign. And I know that you’re going to send me three more emails in the next five days. They do all that. And I just go select, select, select, mark as read, file it. It’s Monday, I got work to do, right? And it’s $17 I’ll never get back, right? And so you’ve got to do something different, right? You got to figure out how do you engage that customer? How do you remove a lot of the friction? And at the same time, how do you engage the builder, the person who’s creating that course to help them get a course launched sooner than what we do today, right?

And I don’t care if you’re using LifterLMS, LearnDash, Podia, AccessAlly, anybody. The problem is not technical, right? The core of the problem is that people go, now I have to create a 32 lesson course, and you’re like… Or six, you could try six, right? Robert and I have a friend in common who has created a course. And she and I were talking just a few weeks ago where she said, I have a free course and then I have a paid course. And nobody’s moving from my free course to my paid course. And I said, how many lessons are in your free course? And she said, I don’t remember what the number was, but it was like 25. And how many are in your paid course? Like 45, right? And I go, well, I submit to you that your 25 is probably overkill. Your free course could have been four and then your paid course could have been 20, and we would have been fine, right? People don’t want to know everything you know. They only want to know what they want to know. And every course instructor in the world thinks I’m a domain expert, I’m trying to create a domain expert.

But on the other side, when we buy a course, we’re like, ah, I don’t want to be a domain expert, right? I just want to know how to do this one thing. And so how do you help course creators create smaller courses, more fine tune courses, allow the people who sign up for and buy courses to get to the core of what they want faster, right? And not the, oh my God, I’m looking at 34 lessons that I got to go through just so I can figure out this one thing. So there’s a lot of, how do we help the people who are taking courses complete them more, but also how do we help course creators complete and get their courses launched faster? And so we were having those conversations inside all the time.

Robert: You’re hitting the nail on two really critical things that in fact even expand beyond the LMS world, but the paradox of choice and just friction in general. And certainly the paradox of choice creates friction in and of itself. But how quickly can you get creators on board without dealing with the stuff that it’s not that they can’t, or won’t do the Stripe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? But should they? And then as you mentioned on the sort of end user side, the learner side, how can I get to the content that I really need right now? Because it’s still content at the end of the day that needs to be absorbed. And some of it, you’re just going to need more quickly and readily than becoming a domain expert.

But I love that you started out with calligraphy because it’s such a broad base thing. I don’t need to know the 300 different kinds of brushes. I’ll take one. I just need to know how to make the letter R.

Chris: Here’s the hilarious thing, and I don’t, I really, really don’t want to pick on calligraphy. So we can pick anything else, but I happen to know a lot about headphones. So imagine I created a course that was called how to pick the right headphones for you, okay? And you’re like, oh, this is great. And I charge $17. So, you’re not going to spend an arm and a leg, but you’re like, hey, Lema knows a lot about headphones. He’s created this so many course. I’m super excited. And the first thing I do is I go, let me tell you about the history of how sound has been working in headphones. And you’re like, why? I don’t care about the history.

And then you’re like, let me tell you about how sound reverberates inside the ear cuff, and therefore what close back and open back headphones, how they differ. And you’re like, why? I don’t need to know. We literally give people far more information they need to know. And you’re like, well here, I’m going to ask you seven questions about the environments you’re in and how you use your headphones. And once you answer those seven, I can not only tell you which is the right one, which kind of headphone’s the right one, but what are some actual physical headphones that you might use because of that kind, and also why you don’t want to use these others and we’re done. And you’re like, that’s all I wanted. For $17 if you could fix that and give me that information, that’s all I want. We’re like, it was 1904. And you’re like, oh no, God, please don’t tell me the history of headphones, right? I don’t need to know that. And we do that on courses everywhere, right? And so part of it is figuring out, okay, let’s equip them for creating the kind of courses that they can get out the door quickly and monetize, and actually see benefit right away.

Robert knows my ladder strategy, but you can always take a product that’s working and make something that is more than what you gave them as a step up up the ladder. You can always condense it smaller and give something down. You don’t have to produce the single Magnum Opus of your course, right? Of your lifetime. You can turn it into multiple courses and even create kind of a, here’s an option, and if you want to know more. When we watch movies on iTunes, we watch movie. And then at the end of the movie, if my wife and I really liked the movie, we go to the extras and we’re like, oh, look at all these. Here’s a behind the scenes. If we don’t like the movie, it’s like, go to the next thing. I don’t need to know the history and the background and how they decided to fund the film and how they convinced the actors to come to the film. And I don’t have to know how they did the studio effects for the film. I don’t even know any of that unless I want more. If I want more, I have access to it.

Robbie: And I totally agree with you, Chris. We, a lot of times work with our trainers or our clients and we’re building training sites for that. Start small. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Write a Book in 30 Days, but basically, the NaNoWriMo Month is just put everything down. And so that’s where we usually start with people who’ve never done a course before, it’s just write it all down.

Just write down all the things you could think of that you would want to tell someone. As you’re going through your day, make little notes, things like that. And so I think that as people build up their notes, they literally know, and people are always like, well, I do a simple thing, calligraphy. Do you know how complicated it is when you really break down any job? It’s very complicated. And so a lot of people are like, well, I don’t know enough that people would pay me for this. You probably do. And then whenever they start taking notes a week or two later, they’re like, Robbie, wow, this is a lot. I think it’s going to be longer than I thought. But let’s start with just this part. So, yes, I totally agree with that. I want to circle back real quickly too though, because I think where we were talking about community and cohorts, I think we also have to bring up gamification. Because I find gamification one, it plays into the community, but it also still works on an individual level too. And so I know that Uncanny has some gamification for LearnDash. I don’t know if anybody else does. I’m sorry, I’m not certain. And I don’t think LearnDash doesn’t have any gamification built in direct, does it? I’m not certain, so.

Chris: The gamification, the predominant model for gamification is using one of our partners. So from the beginning in LearnDash’s history, right? We did a lot of letting partners extend the platform and it works. It’s an incredible strategy when you’re trying to grow a product and a brand, is you let a lot of partners go out there and proselytize and tell people, hey, look, this is really cool. The harder part is the backlash that comes from that later, and I’m not saying anything new to WooCommerce audiences, is when later someone’s like, ah, yeah, you can do that with WooCommerce, but then you need like four extensions. And you’re like, right, but those extensions are not used by every single person and so it makes sense to have them extra, right?

And so part of the work with LearnDash was allowing some of these… Was not just allowing, encouraging this kind of dynamic and then saying, how do we do it? Now, LearnDash does have an achievements add-on. And so if you’re a LearnDash user, you go into the achievements add-on, you can go to the add-ons and you can find those things and you can do that, right? So we do have a version, but we also have a lot of partners that have extra stuff too. And so BadgeOS, I think is one of those. MyCred is another. I think there’s Dopey Achievements. So there’s a handful of those. I won’t remember all of them.

Robbie: And by the way, you’re right. Robert and I both came from the Joomla world before the WordPress world, right? And so we were in the world of where you wanted an extension that did everything if you could, and so you could have the fewest amount of plugins in the WordPress world as possible in the entire world.

Whereas when switching over to the WordPress world, you do have to get used to, yes, I’m on LearnDash and then I want to do this. Oh, I need to put in on plugin. Oh, and I’m going to sell… Oh, I need WooCommerce. Oh, I need a subscription. Oh, I need Woo’s subscriptions or something. So there’s a lot more moving parts. And it did take a little bit of a mental reset for me, I feel like, but at the same token, you’re right. I don’t have to have every plugin out there because I only want to do the certain things that I want to do. And I actually am glad that the plugins I have are not weighted down with too much that I’m never going to use. So, I’m trying to flip my mental perspective on this.

Chris: So LearnDash achievements, both connect to some of the normal WordPress triggers and then specific triggers inside of LearnDash, right? So if you have a user that registers, you can trigger that. You can go, oh, if they do this and that, I can use those as triggers to make moves, create badges, deliver, all that stuff. But you can also, when they enroll in a course, when they complete a lesson, when they pass a quiz, those are all triggers that you can use. And so there is some core functions. It’s not in the core plugin, it’s an add-on, but it’s free when you buy the plugin. So you can go in and add, if you need achievements, you can add that. But you also have, like I said, a lot of third-party players out there that are doing stuff with gamification. And I think there’s really two kinds of gamification when I think about stuff. And this is the same when I want someone to buy anything and then I want them to use it, whatever.

I come from the SaaS world, right? So in the SaaS world, what we know is when you buy your account on a SaaS, I’m really looking for the first three or the first five logins, right? And I want to know the Delta or the timeline for when you log in three times or log in five times. So in a SaaS, that’s how I know I got you sticky. If you buy it and then it takes three months to get you to log in five times, I got a problem. But if I can get you to log in five times in the first week, then I’m in a good spot. So a lot of our onboarding in the regular SaaS world was tied to getting them back in and logging. I don’t call that a gamification, right? I call that normally onboarding.

And so, yes, I’m using the trigger based on the one you bought or the trigger on based on when you logged in or the trigger whether your user was created or whether you’ve been enrolled in a course, but I’m not thinking about that as achievements or gamification. I’m thinking about successfully getting you in. Because if all you ever do is come in and you see the big setup and you’ve got to go through six tabs and you’ve got to fill in setting, setting, you’re not going to build a course. You’re not going to finish a course, right? So our focus mode helps people when they get logged into a course as a student, it helps them actually take the course. That’s good. I want them logging back in.

I want them making it a habit. I want them turning it into, yes, this is what I’m doing. So I think of all of that as onboarding, and then I think gamification is the longer-term play, right? So what happens after you’ve taken a course, but I’ve got five more courses? Or what happens if you’ve taken the first three lessons, but I’ve got 23 lessons, right? Then it’s all the triggers that help you keep coming back and keep you engaged. That’s when I think of it as gamification, right? So I do break it up. I think partially that’s just because of my background was SAS. So I look at LearnDash and I go, oh, well, the early part of onboarding, we got to do some work with onboarding, but also there’s some great stuff from Uncanny’s automator, right?

WPFusions integration to tags inside of multiple marketing automation platforms. If you do stuff with marketing automation platforms and you’re not using WPFusion, right, then you’ve got to scratch your head like what’s going on? Now, maybe it’s because you’re using WooCommerce and WooCommerce has a dedicated component into active campaign. And so, okay, that’s your reason. But for a lot of folks, if you start using WPFusion and it’s applying the tags and doing whatever, it’s an incredible way to create that connectivity between what you’re trying to do and how you leverage your onboarding.

And the same thing happens with Uncanny’s Automator, where you’re like, oh, if they do this and they do this, then enroll them in this and then this, give them this bonus, do whatever, right? So there’s a lot of workflow that’s all non code, right? And so those are two very high powered utilities that WooCommerce and LearnDash customers can benefit from.

Thanks to our Pod Friends YITH and ElasticPress from 10up

Robert: Curious how, actually this is going to be to Chris and Robbie, because obviously you’re both in the space from different angles, but how do the brick and mortars who are actually doing things on-site take advantage of courseware and learning management systems and find ways to expand their current offerings or just augment their current offerings?

Chris: So I think there’s a fantastic tie in. So imagine that I went to a guitar center to buy my son his first guitar. I’m buying a physical product. I’m going to go to the store, I’m going to try several physical products. I’m going to find the one that’s right, whatever. But I could also go to lots of other places to buy a guitar, right? I could go to Target and buy a really crappy guitar. And that’s not saying anything negative about Target. It’s just, that’s not where you normally go to get a guitar, but I can go to lots of places. But if I go to Guitar Center and Guitar Center says, hey, if you’re buying your first guitar, we want to let you know that as a benefit of buying your first guitar we have created a 10 lesson online course that is self-paced so that your son can teach himself guitar on his own.

Chris: And I’m like, well, for free? Yeah. So now it’s not, oh, Guitar Center’s making money. It’s Guitar Center’s convincing me to buy it from Guitar Center instead of Target, because Target doesn’t have the online course and Guitar Center could, right? And so there’s this mentality that people think, oh, I have to figure out how to make money off this thing. And for some courses that’s absolutely right. But for some, the course is the bonus and there’s no need to make the money. What you’re really trying to fight for is I’m the place that you buy it at, right? That you choose me over everything else. This is what Amazon did against all of its competitors, right?

When I was, this is early days, right, when I was buying books on Amazon, and then they started adding watches. And my wife was like, but there’s a jeweler down the street. And I’m like, yeah, but you know what? I can just find a watch here and then just buy a watch and then just have it shipped to me and it’ll be at my door. And then I started buying televisions, right? And I buy the television and it’s an 80 inch television. Oh, I’ll just have it bought on Amazon and delivered here.

And so literally one store was causing me to not go to a jeweler and not go to Best Buy all because I was lazy and I just wanted it on my doorstep instead of me getting in the car, driving somewhere, seeing what inventory they had available or what they didn’t, et cetera. Amazon realized this isn’t just about selling more stuff and making more money. It’s also about creating the habit that defines choice. Where do I go to buy stuff? And Amazon made it so that most of us said, my first inclination is to go to Amazon, see if they have it. If they don’t have it, then I’ll go looking for a physical store. You can use, physical retail can use online courses as a way to say, I have these bonuses. They can come alongside and help you. They’re post product purchase offerings, and they can be courses that teach you anything that you want about the thing you just bought. But the reason I do that is because I’m trying to drive choice. I’m trying to get you to say, I want to buy at Guitar Center. I don’t want to buy at Target.

Chris: If you’re a specialty bicycle store, I want to give you tips Especially if you’re buying 10,000 and $15,000 bicycles, I want to teach you how to race. I just hung out with a buddy of mine from college who has a $10,000 bicycle. And I’m like, that’s insane. Now, of course I have very expensive headphones. So we all have our thing, but he’s not even a serious, serious competitor. But he was like, oh yeah, last week we did 50 miles on a bicycle. And I’m like, 50 miles? You’ve got to be pro level to do 50. He’s like, I’m not pro level, I’m not anywhere near. 50 miles is not that big a deal. And I’m like, okay, well, what kind of bike do you have? And he names it. I’ve never heard of it. And I go, oh, is that an expensive bike? He’s like no. I’m like, okay, sorry, let me back up. How much did it cost? Oh, 10,000 bucks. I’m like, right? This is crazy.

So if you’re a bike shop and you’re selling specialty bikes, think about all the different kinds of courses you could teach, all the material you could create that makes people want to choose your store versus a sporting goods store.

Robert: So then I guess the same question back at Robbie then how do you think about courses then for those kinds of folks?

Robbie: Well, I was going to say, you’re talking about the in-person training versus online training too, like the personal touch versus that. What we saw it was really interesting. Pandemic was an interesting time where things changed a lot. As Chris said earlier, the adoption rate for online training just went out the roof. It’s true. Well, not the first month. The first month we all were like, what is going on? And nobody did anything. And then after that, everybody’s like, well, I’m stuck at home, I’m going to learn something new, whatever. And so people started adopting that online learning. What we also saw though from our side is now we have books too, right? So we have physical books in a lot of universities and schools.

I mean, even high schools, things like that use the books in their courseware, which is normally just fine. They just get the books, they use them with their students. They’re doing this all in person, right? Pandemic hit, they’re not in person now. They’re trying to do this remote. So we had a lot of those teachers that were panicked. They were contacting us and we’re like, hey, y’all have a video course that goes along with this book, right? Can we make this available to our students? And we actually took our WordPress explained course and made it free during the pandemic, because we had a lot of very poor school districts that were like, well, but we can’t afford anything.

So we’re like, okay. So we took the WordPress explain and made it free for those people for them to use. And what we found was then now as we’re kind of coming back out of things and people are going into the classroom again, guess what? Now I’m getting some interest in some of the universities saying, hey, could you guys come in and bring one of your trainers and do a week here with our students on this or something like that? So it’s kind of weird, right? We went from used to do a lot of in-person training with those training, then it was just pretty much all online. Then the pandemic hit and we had even more people come online. But now as I’m coming out of it, now we’re actually starting to get interest again for in-person teaching. So I think it’s very interesting to see this kind of cycle that’s happening here.

I don’t think that we’re going to see any difference in the online though, I’m only hoping. We’re not going to see any difference. I think we’re only going to see growth in the online market.

Robert: I asked the question about the brick and mortar shops, but what about the purely virtual folks? So the extension builders, the plugin developers, the community that’s actually building into LearnDash or into WooCommerce, or obviously WordPress in general. What’s that framework for them to start thinking about courses or should they even not bother just word of mouth, Google it blah, blah, blah?

Chris: No, I think you have at least three different categories of where you can use a course. The first is the pre-purchase course that convinces you that you should buy a product, right? So one of my favorite strategies is, let me show you how you can do this without buying anything. You can do, here are the 792 steps, and I’m going to show you every one of them in detail. I’m going to walk you through. It’s not 700, but it’s like, I’m going to walk you through the 18 steps or the 23 steps that you can do this. You don’t need a product, you don’t need anything. I’m going to give away all the information for free. And all you’ve done is convinced someone that, oh dear God, I don’t want to do those 23 steps. Can someone please do this for me, right? And then you’re like, oh, by the way, if you don’t want to do the 23 steps, we have a product that automates 20 of the 23 steps. So it’s a great pre-purchase offering, is a course that gives away everything that you can do manually so that you don’t need to buy the product. And most people are terrified of doing that because they’re like, oh, then no, one’s going to buy my product.

You don’t understand how much people value their time, right? Nobody wants to do all that work. Then you have right after they buy a product and it’s education for onboarding, right? Let me show you how to make the most use of this. Let me help you skip all of the errors that you might make.These are the three common cases of how to use it. Let’s get you configured up and running.

Chris: When I bought a new camera, I went on YouTube to go, hey, what setting should I have for this camera? The camera has like 18 tabs, each tab, and it’s on that little screen, but each tab has another 10 options. And I’m like, I don’t know what these all are and I don’t know how they cross relate. So you go on YouTube, you watch a guy. He goes, go here, change this, go here, change that, go here and change that. And you’re like done, done, done, okay. Now, a year later I plugged in the camera to do something and something weird was going on. And I realized, I changed the setting on the top of the camera, which lost all my other settings in the menu. And when I changed it back, it was all back. And I’m like, oh, now it looks normal again, right?

Chris: You don’t know what you don’t know, but I’ll tell you most people who sell digital products, like a plugin, have a settings set of tabs and nobody knows what all those check boxes do, right? They’re there because the plugin author realized, ah, sometimes I have this edge case, so here’s a check box, check it off and it’ll solve the problem. But I don’t know what that does and I don’t know how it works, and I don’t know when to use it or not. So right after purchase an onboarding course, four, five, six lessons can be very, very powerful because it’s like, okay, let me get started. And then I think there’s a third opportunity when you push it out a little bit, right?

Chris: Give it a couple months, depending on how long using your plugin normally takes. You give it a little bit and then you come back and you go, hey would you like to make your use of this utility or this plugin, this feature more effective? I mean, I’m telling you, having had thousands of conversations about WooCommerce, there is never an end of like, I go, hey, why are you doing that? Well, because that’s how it works. I’m like, nope, that’s not the only way it works. Can I show you how to do something that would be better and faster? And they’re like, yes, please. And you go, okay, let’s go here, turn this on. Let’s go here, do that. Let’s go here and add this extension and remove these things you did. And now it’s cleaner and it’s faster and it’s easier. And they’re like, I didn’t know that was possible.

So you have these things that you could teach two months down the line or three months down the line or six months down the line that says, hey, how to make the most out of this product, how to save yourself time and how to make more money, blah, blah, blah right? So I think those are three different moments of time and people navigate through that life cycle of using a product. And you can use courses at any of those three spots or if you want, all of them.

Robbie: Absolutely, and re-utilizing content too to do different development cycles like that too, is always good I feel like. And you bring up a really good point too there, Chris, with a lot of people what they’re looking for when they’re buying trainee is just particular needs. I mean, I do it too. I know Photoshop, right? I know how to do this particular thing in Photoshop. Now, of course, we always go look on YouTube. Just like you said, you go look on YouTube and there’s probably some eight year old who’s going to show me how to do this in his bedroom perfectly. But a lot of times I need even maybe more pointed.

And so I’ll buy courses on Plural site or LinkedIn Learning, things like this, but I want that ability to hop around. And so I do appreciate that LearnDash has less the freeform for the courses because I feel like particularly a lot of our clients and even our clients that we build sites for their training too. I found that’s what people are doing. They don’t always necessarily go through the entire course. They are hopping around in that because they’re like, I need to know how to set up reoccurring payments or I need to know how to do shipping for this. And so they just hop through the course and watch what they want.

You’ve got that courses, the 101 and they can hop around on, but then taking people and saying now we’re going to build this type of learning course website for X and then taking them through the full process of doing that. No, we still don’t make that linear. But I do know a lot of schools that have adopted the online learning. They need the linear courses because they need to make sure that the students go through every single step in order and things like that. But do you guys get a sense for what’s used more often out there with LearnDash?

Chris: So I think they’re all used. We have everybody doing everything. So people who are on a dedicated, you’ve got to pass level one to get to level two. Lessons one through five, you’ve got to do them in order and you can’t get to five unless you’ve done one through four. We have those. And we have people who are like, let me bounce around. I think the core of the question at least in the way I think about it is there are skill gaps and there are knowledge gaps, and those are different. And a skill gap may require scaffolding, but it may not. There are knowledge gaps. Those often don’t require the same scaffolding. So a skill gap if I say, I want to help you build a bird house, I’m going to introduce you to a table saw.

I’m going to introduce you to a lever. I’m going to introduce you to a power drill. And you know what? I better sequence that so you don’t cut your fingers off. But if I’m talking about a knowledge gap, where I go, hey what does this setting do? I don’t need to know what you were thinking about when you created the plugin and the history of the plugin and all the other features of the plugin to know what this thing does, right? So, when you have a knowledge gap unless you’re trying to get a PhD in some material, in which case you need to know the history of everything, but a knowledge gap. And this is where we get confused, right? When you’re creating a course, we think that everything is a skill gap and so we want to scaffold all the learning.

Like you need this before this, before this, before this. And they’re like time out. I just want to know how to configure my camera to not make beeps. Oh, go to this tab and this tab, check this box, done. Knowledge, gap averted. We’re clear. I don’t need anything else. Knowledge gaps don’t require or don’t often require the same kind of scaffolding that a skill gap does. And so I think you ought to shape your course based on what kind of gap you’re trying to solve. And unfortunately, the people out there who are selling you how to create your course and six figure courses, and they all have one model. And so then they teach you like this is what you’ve got to do, you’ve got to do.

And I’m like, nope, because if I come at it from the perspective of the learner, if I just have three questions I want solved, I would love micro lessons that are super small that are named correctly. Not like Kristen ice cream. I don’t want that title. I don’t know what that is, right? I don’t want an inside joke that I have to listen to the whole thing before I figure out the title. I want adjusting the volumes, sounds that come out of your camera. Okay, click. It’s three minutes. Show me what I need to know. That’s a knowledge gap. And if I can get in there and get out, I’m happy I paid the money, right? Because I got what I wanted out of it.

Robbie: Awesome. Well, I’m going to, wait, we could talk all day with you, Chris, but I’m going to ask one final question. And it’s kind of to both of you guys, especially because I think you both have the background for this question and that is, we do know we’re running a LearnDash site, WooCommerce and all this.

This is a pretty hefty site. And the more and more students we get, the more hosting becomes important. And so I know both of you guys know a slight little bit about hosting. And so what would be your top few recommendations that you would say, if I want to run a training, online training course website, what should I be looking for in a host?

Chris: So unlike other websites that are running on WordPress, online learning is something that requires people to not always have a cached environment, right? And so it’s not a brochure where you can just cache it on the server. You can even cache it on CDN and then just replay it over and over and over again and be done, right? You don’t have to hit the resources. You don’t have to make database calls.

You don’t have to have PHP doing work. A brochure is super easy to manage. When you’re talking about online learning and every person’s logged in and every person is making those queries and calling that stuff, you end up in a situation where you’re like, I need infrastructure to help keep this live. A lot of people get confused and think, oh, what I need is more RAM. I need more CPU, whatever. It’s not actually the case. If you put a box and if you spin up a box and you have 64 gigs of RAM, that doesn’t change your website and how much RAM a specific request calls. So imagine I have 64 lanes on the highway, but if it’s three in the morning and there’s only you and it’s only one car, I can’t be in all 64 lanes, I’m going to be in one lane. So all the 64 lanes don’t do me any good, right? I can only go as fast as my car goes. And if my car is a beat up old car that can’t get above 50, it doesn’t matter how wide the lanes are. So we like to think about RAM. We like to think about CPUs and CPUs are important, but what you’ve got to remember is it’s what the size of the request is, right?

Which is when you click on a page and you’re pulling stuff down, it’s that request. And the fact of the matter is, is how many requests, right? So you’re making calls to third-party stuff. You’re doing JavaScript calls outbound. You’re doing calls back to the database. All of that depends on the theme you’re using, the configuration of LearnDash, the configuration of third party extensions that get pulled in at the time that you’re loading a page or a lesson. So all of that is at play. So every person’s deployment is different. The theme you use, the third-party plugins you have, the configuration that you’ve set up with all those all changes, the number of requests and the size of the request. But once you understand that, then you need any hosting environment. You need to make sure you have enough ability to handle parallel processing.

And parallel processing is the same as when if you were walking through Walmart and you were shopping and filling up your cart and you got to the checkout stands and you saw 40 checkout stands, but you only had two cashiers. You’re standing in line and you’re standing behind 10 other people and you’re waiting. And you’re waiting because there’s only two cashiers. Doesn’t matter that there’s 40 cash registers. Doesn’t matter if someone walks up to me who is an employee of the store and says, hey, do you want a bigger cart? And I go, no, I don’t need a bigger cart. I need another cash register opened up and they go, hey, hey, do you need a credit limit, increased on your credit card? You’re like, nope. I just need another checkout stand opened up. Get me a cashier. He goes, oh, when you get to the other side, do you need a bigger van? We can rent you a van. And you’re like, I don’t need your disk space. I don’t need your RAM and I don’t need necessarily a much more beefy server in terms of CPU and nodes. What I need is more PHP workers or more child threads.

If I can do more concurrent work, now that’s assuming that the server has the resources for those threads. But if you go to an airport that’s big and you’re going through TSA, you know that what you want is more lanes, more gates, right? And the more people you have, that’s awesome. But if you go to a very small airport, right? And you go to TSA and there’s only two gates on the other end, but they get paid anyway. So all of a sudden you have six agents and you’re only seeing like one person walk through every hour. You’re like, this is a very expensive proposition. So PHP workers is one of the things that you go too much, you’re going to spend money that you don’t need, right?

You go too little, you’re going to see everybody lined up. And so the real trick is it doesn’t matter who you host with, the conversation you have to have is about concurrency. And if the person on the other end of the line doesn’t have a clue what you’re talking about and they start telling you we do caching so you don’t have to worry about concurrency, hang up the phone and call someone else. And you keep calling until someone on the other end of the line goes, oh yeah, totally. We understand what you’re doing, right? When we designed, I was part of the team that designed the managed WordPress for Liquid Web. We started immediately only building a platform for online learning, membership sites and e-commerce.

And we did that with high throughput for multiple child threads, because we said, you can go get all the other stuff, all the brochure-ware sites and all the other hosting and all the caching, you can get that from lots of players. But when you get 100% membership site, WP Engine at the time would tell you, yeah, we don’t do that here, right? Kinsta would tell you yeah, you can’t do that on the $30 plan. You need the $100 plan, right? And so we designed a platform that was specific for high concurrency on non cacheable sites, but there’s nothing magical to it. It’s a max child threads line in your Apache config. I mean, it’s not the end of the world, but you need to make sure you have the resources and you have everything else connected to it. So, that’s my answer of how you solve it without telling you where you host. You can host anywhere, just make sure you’re talking to someone really good about

Robert: Chris is 100% right, because every host does their own thing differently. I mean, probably 90% of the people here know they could just go to AWS and try to roll your own environment. And the questions that you need to ask are, how vertically scalable and how horizontally scalable. So vertical, that’s the checkout line.

How fast is that one checkout person, using Chris’s metaphor, can get through orders? And then horizontally, how many lanes are open? And that’s all what you’re trying to figure out all the time. And different hosts handle those questions very differently. I mean, to be as polite but as honest as possible, and some want to jam it all through a single pipeline and others don’t. I mean, it’s as simple as it gets. So, think about LMS hosting, and Chris mentioned this as well, it’s very, very similar to WooCommerce hosting. You’re not going to be able to jam stack your way out of it. You’re not going to be able to headless your way out of it in a lot of cases, because there’s so much back and forth about progress, time you’ve spent in a lesson, all this interactive stuff that can’t be cached or cookied as easily as we’d all like.

So I’ll spend only those 30 seconds to just say that, yes, think about how fast a single checkout line can go and how many checkout lanes you can have. And you can get into the weeds, but if your host doesn’t understand those concepts in the first place, then you’re going to be SOL and that’s it Awesome. No, I mean I know through my own experiences as well as with our clients, hosting is a key decision there. So I appreciate that. That was a great definition, Chris, to explain PHP helpers and such. I really liked that and I hope that our audience, whether they are doing a LearnDash or an LMS of any kind, they’re probably doing WooCommerce. And WooCommerce, it’s just imperative. It’s imperative for your hosting.

Robert: Where can we find you, Chris?

Chris: Chrislema.com and @ChrisLema I’m on Twitter. Those are probably the two fastest ways to find me.

Robbie: Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. And like I said, we could probably talk all day here, but we do have other work to do, so we probably should go and do that. But thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Chris: Thanks a lot. You guys take care.