In Spring 2020, the whole world moved to online meetings.

Suddenly, many people's calendars looked like Swiss cheese, with small blocks of free time scattered between back-to-back Zoom and Teams meetings.

And even though people were meeting more to keep things running, everyone was scratching their head about how to do it right.

A friend and I saw an opportunity. With our work experience as freelance workshop facilitators and expertise in digital collaboration tools like Miro, we could dive into the science of successful online meetings and create a course around it.

Fast-forward five years, and we've sold over €250.000 worth of cohort-based courses at Facilitator School through Outseta. Along the way, we’ve learned valuable lessons about building an education business, marketing courses, and delivering transformational training.

In this article, I look back at the 9 key lessons that stand out for me. Before we dive in, I also recorded a short video, to give you an overview of our business, the marketing funnel that worked for us, and how we leveraged tools like Outseta, Webflow and Circle to run our business.

1. Get paid for creating your course

Since the pandemic basically erased our project pipeline as freelance workshop facilitators, we didn’t have the financial cushion to spend months developing a cohort-based course. So, we had to get creative.

We still had a network of clients, though, who used to book us for workshops. That sparked an idea: Why not sell the cohort-based course as a 6-week long training program to one company? This way, we could get paid to develop it.

Armed with just a training pitch deck, we scheduled some calls. Eventually, one of our old clients was interested in facilitation training, since they were moving everything to Zoom and they had fond memories of our in-person sessions.

Lesson learned: Building a cohort-based course, particularly one with video lessons, takes a lot of time. If your course focuses on a B2B topic, consider selling it as company training first. This approach allows you to earn money while developing the course and gather valuable feedback from your initial group of learners.

2. Find a good wave to ride

Starting out, our key challenge was to reach our target audience of team leaders and HR professionals. We tried our luck with webinars and LinkedIn, but had only mixed results.

But by being active on LinkedIn, we noticed something: Miro, the online-whiteboard tool, was rapidly growing in popularity as a result of a shift towards work-from-home.

Since Miro users are often interested in team collaboration and creative working methods, we realized there was a good overlap with our target audience.

To tap into Miro's growth, we got involved in their community and started uploading templates to Miro’s community template library.

One of our most popular templates—the Character Mix & Match icebreaker—has been duplicated over 12,000 times and was frequently mentioned by course participants as the way they discovered us.

Lesson learned: At the start, look for a good wave to catch with your cohort-based course. Such as a growing platform, community or trend that you can lean into and leverage to attract your first real customers.

3. Build trust through 1-on-1 course demos

Even though our website traffic and waitlist were growing, sales remained slow—which makes sense in hindsight.

Investing in a high-ticket cohort-based course is a big commitment—both in time and money. It takes more than just a nice website and a good first impression to convince someone to pull out their wallet for high-ticket products.

Trust is essential, and in my experience it is best built through authority and social proof. Initially, we lacked both. We quickly had to accept that we were neither Tiago Forte nor David Perell.

So, how did we bridge that gap?

What worked for us was offering one-on-one course demos. Yes, they were time-consuming, but they allowed us to showcase our facilitation skills, clear open questions, and discuss learning goals directly with potential participants.

This helped us to create personal connection, that our website simply couldn’t replicate. My co-founder, René, sometimes had streaks where he converted multiple back-to-back demos into paying customers—without any pushy sales tactics.

Lesson learned: Consider offering one-on-one course demos to build the necessary trust to convert leads into customers. This is also a great opportunity to see how customers perceive your course offering and what challenges they’re looking to solve.

4. Leverage urgency and scarcity, but not too much

There is a plain good reason why booking platforms use urgency and scarcity in their website and marketing: It just works. When people think they might miss out on something valuable, they’re more likely to take action.

We've seen this pattern in our own cohorts: Many people often waited until the last 1–2 days before the enrollment period closed to make their purchase. This effect was even bigger, when the course was already filled by at least 75%.

We used this to our advantage by adding genuine scarcity and urgency:

• Limit the number of available spots—this also creates a more personalized experience.
• Open and close enrollment in a short timeframe—think 1 to 3 weeks.
• Run an early bird campaign—give early waitlist subscribers a chance to enroll before the public.

However, we’ve always been careful not to overdo it, because you don’t want people to feel manipulated.

Lesson learned: Urgency and scarcity work. Consider limiting your course spots, enrollment timeframe, or add an early bird offering to get early momentum into the cohort. That said, stay authentic and don’t spin false narratives.

5. Take advantage of timely opportunities

In November 2023, I was invited to speak at Miro’s annual online conference. To be honest, I put it on the lower bracket of my priority list. I was busy prepping for a cohort and didn’t expect much return from the conference talk.

Then, just days before my talk, I found out that the Miro team scheduled my talk on advanced Miro tips and tricks right after the opening talk. And that 40,000 people had signed up for the conference!

That’s when I had an epiphany—this was a big opportunity for marketing, and I wasn’t ready to take advantage of it all. What could I do?

With time being a scarce commodity, I created a simple Outseta lead magnet form. At the beginning of my talk, I let everyone know I’d cover a lot of content and would send out a summary of all the tips the next day—so no one had to worry about taking notes.

I shared the link to the Outseta form and then moved on with my presentation. Out of 600 participants in my session, 339 signed up for the PDF, and quite a few also joined our newsletter.

From the 339, almost 70% clicked through to download the handbook or to learn more about our course—really strong numbers for a lead magnet! It really shows how having the right idea at the right time can make a big difference.

Lesson learned: Some marketing opportunities don’t last long. It's better to act quickly and grab the opportunity instead of overthinking it and letting it slip away.

6. Automate, Automate, Automate

Although I would consider a cohort-based course to be a productized service, they still require a lot of manual work. You have to run live sessions, answer questions, moderate the community, and do all kinds of communications work.

And if you're running multiple cohorts each year—like we do—those manual tasks or processes can quickly pile up. Which makes it tough to make progress in any other area.

One example of a time consuming process came in the form of a scholarship we offered to people with limited resources. We’d review the applications and send emails through Gmail with discount codes to those who were approved—and friendly rejections to everyone else.

To automate this process, I created a Kanban view in Airtable to track all incoming applications and their statuses (Applied, Approved, Rejected). Then I linked the Airtable data to Outseta with a simple automation.

From then on, setting the status of an application to “Approved” automatically triggered a drip campaign in Outseta with the discount code for the scholarship pre-appended (we offered a 50% - 90% discount).

With the advancements in AI tools, I think there will be more and more possibility to automate without diminishing the customer experience. In fact, I think it might even free up time to focus on more essential things like improving the lessons, adding resources, and engaging with the participants.

Lesson learned: Cohort-based courses often involve a lot of communication work and repetitive tasks. To scale and grow, look at tools like Airtable, Zapier, or N8N to automate these tasks to free up time to work on more important things.

7. Give your students the ability to shine

The end of cohort-based courses is a big moment for participants. For weeks, participants have been attending sessions, practicing their skills, and connecting with others. It’s a time to celebrate.

After Cohort 2, we came up with the idea of creating individual certificates of completion. We hired someone on Fiverr to transform participants' LinkedIn profile pictures into beautiful illustrations and added these to the certificates using Canva.

Then, we added the link to the certificate to a custom property in Outseta called certificateURL which automatically triggered an Outseta email automation with the certificate attached to the participant—another time-saver!

While we initially thought of the certificates as just the cherry on top of the course, we soon realized they’d become a marketing channel for us.

Participants loved sharing their certificates on LinkedIn, and some posts garnered 100+ likes. This, of course, drew more curious visitors to our website.

Lesson learned: Course certificates are a great opportunity to end your course on a high note and also encourage your participants to share their milestone with the world. Doing so might pique the interest of their colleagues and friends!

8. Invest into SEO right from the start

In Spring 2022, I remember visiting a friend of mine in Germany who is equally interested in entrepreneurship and company building. At the time, Facilitator School was growing and he asked me which marketing channels were driving the most traffic to our website.

Not having the exact numbers at hand, I pulled out my laptop to show him our Plausible Analytics. We were quite active on LinkedIn and Instagram, so I highlighted the web traffic from those platforms. I felt they were some of our strongest channels for attracting customers.

As we looked at the stats, he pointed out, “You’re getting quite a bit of traffic from Google. How much time are you putting into SEO?” Caught off guard, I replied, “None, really.” And that was true—we hadn’t put any real effort into SEO at that point.

After our meeting, I couldn't shake the thought that Google was bringing us more web traffic than all of our social media activities combined—with zero direct effort.

So, we decided to prioritize SEO and added several resources to our website, including a workshop template library, a facilitation glossary, and longer blog posts.

Eventually, our efforts paid off. We saw an increase in traffic, and many of our waitlist sign-ups started coming directly from Google. Soon enough Google became our strongest marketing channel.

Lesson learned: SEO is a powerful channel. If you invest time in creating valuable resources, writing good blog articles, and optimizing your main landing page early on, you can enjoy the benefits for a long time.

9. Double down on what works

Reflecting on my experience over the last five years, I see marketing as a game of experimentation—finding what works and then really focus on it.

There were times when we got it right. For instance, I’ve spoken at Miro’s annual conference three times now. The first talk was a fast-paced presentation packed with quick tips and tricks, which got really good feedback.

When I was invited to speak again, I basically did the same talk and simply focused on delivering it better, adding more tips and incorporating feedback. I did the same for the third talk. Each time, it was a hit.

Since Miro’s user base changes, no one really noticed. So why change something that works? Sticking with it saved me time, allowed me to refine my delivery, and make it better with each presentation.

This principle is something we could have leveraged more. For example, as mentioned in the last learning, SEO was working great for us. But instead of building on that success, we got sidetracked by other new initiatives, which eventually caused our web traffic to plateau.

Lesson learned: Good marketing means figuring out what works and doubling down on the most promising channels, rather than getting distracted by shiny new ideas.

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If I would recommend the cohort-based course model to anyone, then it’s creators. If you already have an audience you’ve connected with, you’ll find it easier to build momentum right from the start. We began from scratch, and while it’s possible to succeed that way, the journey is definitely longer.

You might also consider selling a traditional video course, but I’ve found that cohort-based courses provide a much better learning experience. Participants tend to learn more, completion rates are higher, and you create strong connections that can lead to other opportunities—like paid memberships or coaching programs.

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