Have you ever started a course or tutorial and within the first few minutes you're completely lost? You're frustrated, maybe even feeling a little bit stupid, and eventually you just give up and you go find something else? What if your students are having that exact same experience with your course and you don't even realize it? 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. I've helped thousands of adults learn new skills over the past 17 years as an educator and online course designer. I've seen this problem over and over, and I recently experienced it myself in a way I never expected. So let me tell you a story. Now, this is about how my daughter stretched the truth and sent me down a rabbit hole that I was not mentally prepared for. Our daughter is very artsy. You know, a lot of kids start out that way doing arts and crafts when they're young, and a lot of them grow out of it. But ours did not. In fact, I feel like our daughter grew into it more as she got older. And she does a lot of stuff. Drawing, painting, lots of crafty stuff. The work she brings home from her art class is phenomenal. We were in the bookstore one day looking around and I found this book about how to crochet Muppets. And I don't mean like hand puppets, I mean the Muppets. Now you probably don't know this about me, but I am a huge Muppets fan. I've watched The Muppets since I was a kid, I've seen all the episodes of the original show, I've seen all the Muppet movies. In fact, it is my opinion that the Muppet Christmas Carol is the best movie adaption of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol out there. So, when I saw this book, I got really excited and asked my daughter, Do you know how to crochet? If we get this book, can you make a Muppet for me? And she said, Yes, I absolutely can. So we got the book, we're looking through it, and the book was about $40, I think. It was not cheap. We flipped through the different Muppets and tried to find one that seemed reasonable. The one we landed on was Rizzo the Rat, because that's one of my favorite characters, and it also seemed like one of the easier ones to start with. Then we went to the craft store and we started buying all the supplies that we needed to make. Spent over $100 on yarns and stuffing and bits and bobs that I have no idea what they were for. At this point, we're around $150 into this project to make one Muppet. My daughter is super excited about it. On the car ride home, she says, I'm going to start on it tonight. We get everything home, and then this stuff sat on a shelf for two months. She never even touched it. So me, being the do-it-yourself kind of person that I am, I looked at it and said, It's crochet. How hard can it be? I bought myself a set of crochet hooks and I started learning how to crochet. And that is where everything went sideways. Now let me tell you, I have finished a PhD program and got my doctorate. I have run a 100-mile ultra marathon. I say these things not to brag, but to give you context for the next bit. Because believe me, when I tell you that learning to crochet as a beginner on your own is the hardest thing I have ever done. I really mean that. I work really well with my hands. I've done woodworking, metal casting, and whenever something breaks around the house, I'm the one that fixes it. I am really good at doing that kind of stuff. But I almost had an aneurysm the first two days I was learning to crochet. Now typically, when you learn a new skill, there's a learning curve. We call it a curve because it's usually kind of gentle. Then as you get more into the skill, it gets more challenging and you need to spend more time to get better at it. And then eventually you will hit a learning plateau. And it feels like you're not making progress. But after a while you break out of the plateau, and you have another uptick and then another plateau. This is just how learning works. Except with crochet, I felt like I hit the learning plateau from minute one. There are so many different things you have to do at the same time to get things to work. Yarn tension, how you wrap the yarn around your hands, how you hold the hook, how you pull the yarn through, do you have the right kind of yarn? What's the weight? What size hook are you using? Stitch names, how to read patterns, and on and on. I spent three hours on the first day and I was able to make a six-stitch chain. Now, if you know how to crochet, or you know someone who crochets, you're probably laughing at me at this point because that is super simple and the very basics of crocheting. Then on day two, I was looking for examples of patterns and things I could make as an absolute beginner, and I found this little heart pattern. It was labeled for absolute beginners, and I think I'll make this to give it to my partner. I spent three hours trying to make this stupid little heart. And when I got done, it looked more like a kidney. But I persevered and I looked for other tutorials. Now I am starting to get the hang of it. It's still not great, but I've sort of gotten past that first learning plateau, which happened to be in minute one, and made this the hardest skill I've ever tried to learn. Now I'm able to start making stuff. I've made a couple of little amigurumi toys. The Muppets, the book we got, that's a type of amigurumi crocheting. And that's what I'm practicing right now, so I can eventually make my Rizzo the rat. When I was looking for patterns in tutorials, I would find ones that claim to be, and I'm using air quotes here, super simple, and you can make this in five minutes. Which is obviously a lie because it took me three hours to make a heart that looked more like a kidney. But those tutorials didn't even have the basic stuff like what kind or what size yarn to use, what size crochet hook. Because those things actually matter. If you use the wrong yarn or wrong hook, your project isn't going to turn out right. And the people making the tutorials didn't include that crucial information. They would just go right into, okay, take your yarn, do this, this, and this. They were starting at the wrong place for an actual absolute beginner. And that's when it hit me. I realized why I was so frustrated. And this is why your students might be feeling the exact same way. There's actually a book title that sums up this whole problem perfectly. I'm a chess enthusiast. I'm terrible at it, but for some reason, I just want to keep playing chess. I have spent hours trying to learn and reading books and taking online courses. Now, based on my skill level, technically, I am a beginner to the chess community. I learned the basics when I was in high school many, many years ago, and in the past three to four years, I've been really trying to get better. And I bought a chess workbook that I think really summarizes this entire issue. The title of the book is I'm a beginner, but I'm not a beginner beginner. And that really describes me because I know all the rules, I do know quite a bit of strategies and tactics, but I'm still technically a beginner. And that's why we need to think about where our audience truly is. Because there's a name for what those tutorial creators were doing to me and what you might be doing to your students without realizing it. We call it the curse of knowledge. As you get more experience in a skill, you tend to forget how hard it was to get started in that skill. And you tend to forget all the little things you had to learn just to get started. For example, what size yarn and what size crochet hook to use? So when you are designing a course, the first thing is understanding your transformation. What is point A and what is point B for your client? What is that transformation you want to give them? But then the second most important thing is to understand your audience. Are they a beginner or are they a beginner but they're not a beginner beginner? That's going to help you understand where they're at and what you need to include in your course so that they can get started and actually finish your course. Because here's what happens. When you don't give them the tools they need to get started, they won't finish and they will go elsewhere. Just like I did when I would find a tutorial that didn't tell me what yarn and hook size I needed, or anything else for that matter. I got frustrated and I skipped it. And if you don't have clients getting through your courses and getting transformations, you are not getting testimonials and you're not getting the social proof you need to grow your business. Even worse, you may be getting clients asking for refunds because they aren't getting what they paid for. Whenever you're creating a course, a lesson, a module, whatever part of the course you're working on, make sure that you really understand where your client is starting from and everything that they will need to get through that piece of content. Not just for the beginning of the course, but for each lesson along the way. Now, coming back to the beginning, I did mention that my daughter stretched the truth a little bit, and the truth stretching was that she was really good at crochet. Turns out she's actually more of a beginner than I am now. At the time of recording, I have managed to crochet several little amigurumi animals. I have a little whale that I just finished. I'll put a link in the show notes so you can see the whale I made. I showed my daughter, and that's when she fessed up. She basically said, Maybe you should make Rizzo. And that's why this stuff we bought sat on the shelf for two months. She was actually worried about trying to get started and doing it when she knew that it was a little bit above her skill level. And that's also what you're going to have with clients. You're going to have clients coming in thinking they are more prepared for your course than they really are. So it is absolutely okay to include beginner information in your course to make sure that your clients can get started. Otherwise, they're likely to give up and never finish. This is a different style of podcast than I normally do, and I would love to hear your feedback on it. There's a link in the show notes where you can send me a message. Go down there and click the link and send me a message. Let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to cover in future episodes, send them to me. I'd love to hear. 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.