Build your first course in 15 minutes

This walks through a real course end to end: two lessons, a gap between them, and a page people can sign up on. Fifteen minutes, and you can delete it afterwards.

Nothing here enrolls anybody, so your free trial stays where it is.

Create the course

Open Courses and choose Add Course. Three things matter:

• Title - what learners see.

• Description - what appears on the enrollment page. Up to 1000 characters; a short paragraph is plenty.

• Slug - a short label that becomes part of the course's web address, like intro-to-email-courses. Up to 50 characters.

Save, and you have a course. It is not visible to anyone yet, new courses start switched off, which is what lets you build in peace.

Write the first lesson

Open the course and choose Add Lesson. Give it a title and write the content, this is the email your learner receives, so write it as an email, not as a chapter.

Set its waiting period to 0. Every piece of content has one, and for the first it is counted from the moment someone enrolls, so zero means the lesson arrives while they are still on the thank-you page. Any other value leaves a new signup waiting with nothing to show for it.

Keep this one short. It arrives when interest is highest and patience for a wall of text is lowest.

Add a second lesson, and set the gap

Add another lesson the same way, and give this one a real waiting period, two or three days is a sensible default. It counts from when the previous content was sent, not from when the learner enrolled.

That gap is what makes this a course rather than a newsletter: it gives the reader time to do something with the first lesson before the second arrives.

Content is delivered in the order it appears on the course page, and you can drag items to reorder them.

Publish the lessons

Lessons do not go live just because you wrote them. Each one has its own published state, and new ones start unpublished so that a half-written draft can sit safely inside a running course. Publish both lessons before moving on.

Turn the course on

Back on the courses list, switch the course to enabled.

That is the second of two separate gates, and they mean different things. Publishing decides whether a lesson is ready; enabling decides whether the course accepts people at all.

Find your enrollment page

Every enabled public course has a public page listing its title, description, and a form requesting one item: an email address. Access it from the course page, read it as an outsider would, and verify that the description accurately conveys what a person receives by signing up.

That address is yours to share. There is nothing else to set up.

Before you enroll anyone

Your 14-day trial begins the moment the first learner enrolls, and enrolling yourself counts. To preview lessons, you have the option to send them to yourself without enrolling by clicking on the send icon in the actions section of the content table. The recommended order is: finish the course, review it in the editor, and enroll only when you are ready for the clock to start.

If this was a throwaway, disable it and leave it. A disabled course blocks new enrollments and disappears from your public page.