Some courses generate testimonials without even asking. The creator has students raving about the results and referrals coming in on autopilot. And then there's everyone else, launching over and over to cold audiences because past students just disappeared. Welcome to Course Creation for Solopreneurs. I'm Dr. Curtis Satterfield, and I've spent 17 years as an educator and course designer helping thousands of students learn new skills. Now I help solopreneurs like you create courses that actually transform your students and grow your business. Let's get into it. After 17 years as an educator, online course designer, and helping thousands of people learn new skills, I've seen both kinds of courses up close. And I found there's one thing the testimonial generating courses do that most courses skip entirely. Today I'm going to show you what it is and how to build it into every lesson you create. Let me tell you about a moment that changed how I think about course creation. Around 2018, I was teaching a course on content management in SEO. We were studying the 2014 Facebook algorithm change, the one that first started to hinder organic reach for brand pages. It was the moment when businesses realized they couldn't just post and expect their followers to see it anymore. And I had a student in the back making snide comments. Why are we so worried about old algorithm changes? Things move so fast. We should only be focusing on the present and future. So I stopped and said, because if we don't pay attention to the past, we can't prepare for similar events in the future. We need to understand what happened then so we can prepare our content strategies for when the next big algorithm change occurs. I'd love to tell you he suddenly got it and went on to do great things, but honestly, he was just a jerk looking to make trouble and nothing changed. Here's what did happen though. After class, several other students came to me privately. They said they were glad I explained why we were studying older technology changes. Because they weren't connecting the dots either. They thought we were just studying history for history's sake. They didn't understand how it was relevant to the present and their future. Then, in 2018, during the class, Facebook made the second big shift. This time, organic growth for businesses basically stopped unless you were paying to boost your posts. And I was able to point out and say, see, here we are, just a few years after the first algorithm change started hurting brand pages, and now it's even worse. The pattern repeated. And now you understand why we studied what happened in 2014. That's when I realized the students who didn't understand why weren't being difficult. They were being reasonable. If no one connects the dots for them, why would they assume old information is relevant to their future? And here's the thing: your course students are doing the exact same calculation. Every single lesson they're asking themselves, why does this matter to me? Why should I care about this right now? If you don't answer that question, they check out and eventually they stop coming back altogether. But here's where it gets interesting. You might be thinking, okay, so I just need to explain why things matter. I'll add that to my lessons. That's what most course creation advice tells you. Start with why. Explain the purpose, then tell them how it connects to their goals. And that advice isn't wrong, it's just incomplete. Think about it like this. Imagine that you're trying to eat healthier and someone tells you, just remember to eat more vegetables. Which is great advice, totally true, and I personally should listen to it. But what happens? You do it for a few days and then you get busy. You're tired after work, so you grab whatever's easy, and three weeks later you realize you haven't touched a vegetable in days. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway, compare that to meal prepping. You spend two hours on Sunday chopping vegetables, portioning them out, putting them in containers. Now eating vegetables isn't something you have to remember. It's just what's there when you open the fridge. The structure does the work for you. The advice about eating more veggies was correct, but it relied on your remembering to do it in the moment, every single time. And that is not how humans work. The same thing happens when you try to remember to explain why in your course. You do it for the first few lessons. Then you get busy recording, you get focused on the content itself, you forget or you assume the why is obvious. So you tell yourself, we'll figure it out. And then you're right back to where you started, with students who don't understand why, they're learning what they're learning. That's the difference between remember to explain why and what I'm about to show you. One relies on willpower, the other builds purpose into the architecture so it's impossible to leave out. So what does that actually look like? There are two tools I use to make sure every lesson in a course has a clear purpose baked in. And neither of them requires you to remember anything because they're structural. They're how you design a lesson in the first place. So a vague lesson sounds like this understanding payment processors. What's the outcome of that lesson? Understanding. But that's not an action, it's a state of mind, and it gives you no guidance on what actually goes in this lesson. An outcome-driven lesson sounds like this. Set up your payment processor in 15 minutes. Now you know exactly what the student will be able to do, and more importantly, they know. The purpose is obvious before the lesson even starts. Here's why this matters for the why problem. When you have a clear outcome, explaining why becomes almost automatic. By the end of this lesson, you'll have your payment processor set up and ready to accept your first payment. The student immediately knows why this lesson matters because they want to get paid. But when your outcome is vague, like understanding payment processors, you have to work to explain why it matters, and that's where it gets forgotten. I call this the outcome test. Before you create any lesson, you ask yourself one question. What will my students be able to do after this lesson that they couldn't do before? Not what will they understand, not what will they know about, what can they do? If you can't answer that question clearly, the lesson doesn't have a purpose yet. And if the lesson doesn't have a purpose, your students are going to feel it. The outcome test doesn't just help you, it helps your students stay connected to the purpose of every single lesson. But there's a second tool that takes this even further. And the second tool is even more powerful. Let me show you how different this feels. Without this structure, a lesson might sound like today we're going to talk about how to batch your content. Here are the steps. And then by step three, your students have already checked out mentally because they don't know why they should care. But with the proper structure, it sounds like this. Have you ever spent an entire day working on content and somehow still had nothing ready to post? I was working with a course creator a while back. We'll call her Sarah. She came to me exhausted and told me she was spending 15 hours a week on content and she still couldn't keep up with her posting schedule. I asked her to walk me through a typical content day. She said she'd sit down Monday morning to write her weekly email, but first she'd check out what other people in her niche were posting to get some inspiration and look for emerging trends. An hour later, she'd finally start writing. Then she'd second guess her topic and start over. She'd get a text from her kids' school, handle that, come back and lose her train of thought. By lunch, she had three half-finished drafts and nothing she could send out. Meanwhile, her seven-year-old was asking why mommy was always on the computer. Her husband had stopped asking if she wanted to watch their show together because the answer was always, I can't, I have to finish this email. She was working constantly and still falling behind. And the worst part, she felt like a fraud. Here she was teaching other people how to build businesses, and she couldn't even manage her own content calendar. We implemented a batching system, one focused morning a week, phoned in another room, batch writing all her content for the next seven days. No more daily scrambling, no more half-finished drafts scattered across her week. Within a month, she cut her content time from 15 hours down to four. She was actually present at dinner again. She told me her daughter had noticed and asked why mommy wasn't on the computer anymore. That was the moment she knew it was working. Now that's a story about content batching. But notice what happened while I was telling it. You weren't wondering why batching matters, you could feel it. You could feel it in Sarah's exhaustion and her guilt about missing time with her husband and her daughter. And now, if I were to roll into a lesson teaching you the actual batching method, you're not going to skim it. You're going to pay attention because you understand exactly what's at stake. I call this problem example lesson. Here's how it works. Every time you teach something, you follow this sequence. First, you start with the problem. You describe a specific situation your student has faced or is facing right now. You make them feel the frustration of the problem before you offer any solution. Then you give an example, usually a story. Someone who faced this problem, what happened and how it played out. This makes the problem feel real and concrete, not just abstract. Only then do you give the lesson, the actual teaching, the solution, framework, or whatever you want them to learn to do in this lesson. Why does this sequence matter? Because by the time you get to the lesson, your student already understands why it matters. You built that in with the problem. You made it emotional with the example. The why isn't something you add on top, it's the foundation everything else sits on. That's what problem example lesson does. It builds the why into the foundation so you never have to remember to add it later. But here's the thing most course creators miss even after they understand all of this. You can know about the outcome test, you can understand problem example lesson, but when you sit down to actually build your course, you're going to hit moments where you're not sure if your outcomes are specific enough or whether your stories are landing the way you think they are. That's where the difference gets made. Not in knowing the principles, but in having someone look at your actual lessons and tell you where the gaps are. If you're building a course right now and you're not sure whether your lessons are actually driving towards clear outcomes, or if you've got content that feels disconnected and you're not sure how to fix it, I'd love to help. You can book a free course roadmap call with me, and we'll look at where you're stuck and map out your next steps together. The link is in the description. Thanks for listening. If this episode helped you, take a second to subscribe and leave a review. It's the best way to support the show. Also, be sure to check the show notes for any links and resources mentioned in this episode. Now go create a course that transforms.