Background

In early 2023 I set out to expand my conversational skills with one of my best friends. Our goal? Learn how to approach and talk to total strangers about almost anything.

From late January to early March, I met over 100 people and made some new friends at local spots I’d frequented for months prior.

After seeing our own success and sharing the story with others, I had an outpouring of people telling me that they wish they could do it too… but they didn’t think they could learn.

So, I codified the skills and activities I’d practiced and turned it into a self-directed course and knowledge base.

A blurred out landing page of the final wiki.

Objectives

In creating Chat Anywhere, I wanted to achieve these key objectives:

  • Provide a self-directed course that had clear lessons and applications of learned material in each module
  • Provide free access to start the first day (module) of the program as a lead magnet to decrease attrition
  • Provide paid access to the rest of the course and supplementary materials
  • Build a marketing and sales system to drip new content out to existing students and qualified leads
  • Deploy the course to a simple, search engine optimized (SEO) domain

Solutions

Building Chat Anywhere would require weaving together several digital solutions while keeping knowledge and processes central to avoid overwhelm and confusion.

Here's how I did it:

  • Performed market research on educational courses and platforms that teach conversational skills (keywords, pricing, SWOT analysis, …)
  • Researched, codified, and created an easy-to-follow course with activities in each module
  • Built brand design system for Chat Anywhere including logo, color palette, typography, and messaging
  • Deployed an easy-to-maintain learning management system (LMS)
  • Designed and deployed a simple, conversion-focused landing page
  • Integrated analytics with all web properties
  • Built a central dashboard in Notion to manage course material, project backlogs, and more
  • Created a standard set of templates and processes for building new course modules
  • Built a Continuous Integration/Continuous Development pipeline for deploying new content with minimal hassle
  • Built an integrated system between Super.so, Carrd, Memberspace, and MailerLite to trigger ongoing sales, marketing, and course-material automations to new and continuing students
  • Built a system to syndicate early course promotional material across channels and networks

Implementation

Here are some of the highlights from my build-out of the Chat Anywhere systems:

⚡ Super

As I was building the content for the course and its systems, I oscillated between several learning management tools. Many of the available options were great for implementing courses and modules, but the cost was prohibitive.

I discovered Super.so, middleware that sits on top of Notion (the central database for the course already) and deploys a wiki-style website to a custom domain.

💻 Carrd

While Super was great, it didn’t let me deploy an appealing landing page that was visually different from the main wiki website.

This presented a couple challenges. One, effective landing page designs are often very different from effective knowledge base designs. And two, I wanted to feature media in ways that was difficult (if not impossible) using Super.

I ended up using Carrd, a low-code webpage builder (that’s running this site, too). The annual fee was less than some landing-page-builder’s monthly. Decision to deploy was a no-brainer.

🫂 Memberspace

The final objective that presented an obstacle was gating paid access to the course materials between free (lead magnet) students and fully paid students.Because Super had some limitations on what it integrated with, I researched platforms that integrated with minimal code injection.Finding Memberspace, I was able to install and deploy a members access portal to all but the free content, paying a commission to the platform on a successful sale.

Results

Upon release of Chat Anywhere, the project achieved the following results:

  • Traffic to the landing page from targeted keywords search results (~100 visitors per week)
  • Successful sign-ups to the free tier (avg. CVR 3.5%)
  • Successful completion of the course materials by new students.
  • Overwhelmingly positive feedback and testimonials from site visitors and course students
  • Featured discussions on how I built the course in the Trends.vc startup and founders community
  • Deployed updates and new modules in < 10 seconds, triggering automated drip campaigns with a < 90 second review process post-publish.

Chat Anywhere is currently being migrated to a new LMS and made free to access.

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