13 Reasons Why I Left Teachable and You Should Too

I have been in the online course creation space since 2015. In Internet years that’s like double dog years. And through this journey, I have learned a lot using platforms like teachable.com

I have learned how to create websites using word press, how to host my course on learning management systems, how to duck tape things together using Zapier, how to use email marketing platforms, how to run Facebook ads, etc.

When I first started, I was really bad at all of the above. But as time went on, I continued to hone my skills and got better each day. 

My first course was about how to become a hotel general manager and I was selling it for $297. I soon realized that Hospitality is going to be a tough industry to crack into.  

I also did not perform any keyword research analysis to ensure there was a demand for what I was about to create. Now everything I do start with keyword research first and product next.

Online courses in the hospitality industry are not the norm. I thought it would be a win right out of the gate but boy was I wrong. 

It is always an uphill battle when you introduce a new category and try to sell it. It took me 10X more effort to get people to realize that online courses were a thing and you could learn a valuable skill through that online course.

After two years of trying to convince people and not enough sales to prove the business model, my wife and I put letsrockthehotel.com on the back burner and moved on with our lives. 

I had been given a taste of what it feels like to have passive income. Along the lines, I also discovered teachable.com and immediately fell in love with it.

Wow, it was so easy to build a website and host an online course course all in one platform.

This time around I concentrated on another course related to salesforce.com. In my full-time job I'm a Salesforce consultant. This one looked promising and I started getting consistent sales. But things didn't go too well when teachable introduced back office.

There was all sorts of confusion about who owned the students and, the sign-up process also became very confusing. I’ve had "potential students" signup for my school, but not for my course. This to me makes no sense in the world!

Why would I give someone an option to signup for my school but not my course? MAKES NO SENSE!

The BIGGEST THING about back-office is that if you don't enable back-office then you cannot accept PayPal payments.

Another thing about back-office is that it automatically tacks on 2% fee per transaction.

Above you will see the Sign-up process for a potential student. As you can see, when I'm trying to enroll as a student I get enrolled in THE SCHOOL! This is after click the enroll button on the homepage. One workaround to avoid this confusion is to remove the enroll button from your homepage.

I would understand if after the sign-up process Teachable would allow us to take students through a funnel where you can sell the course, use upsells, etc. But that is non-existent in most LMS's. 

So, after sign-up is successful "potential students" are taken to your courses page where they can select which course they'd like to purchase. There is so much friction between when your potential students decide to buy and when they pay.

By this time, one of three things have probably happened with a majority of your visitors:

1. They've changed their mind about buying
2. They got distracted and bounced off
3. They're now re-thinking their decision

In either case, you can kiss your revenue goodbye. 

So, here are my top 13 reasons for leaving teachable.

One day, out of the blue I got a message from someone who was part of the teachable group. He mentioned that he is in this secret beta group (he had me sold there). And it’s a new platform called NewZenler. I was to receive a code form him that’ll allow me to get enrolled.

It was free for me to try and when they did go public with their pricing, I would get a lifetime discount for being part of the beta group. It was a win-win! 

What’s the worst that’ll happen, I will use the platform, it’ll suck like all the others out there, and I would lose 5 hours of my life!

But it turned out to be quite the opposite. NewZenler checked all the fucking boxes. ALL THE BOXES. As soon as I started using NewZenler I was in love with it. Of course, there was a learning curve, as it is expected with any SaaS product. But the payback is HUGE.

NewZenler is an all in one solution that keeps the course creator in mind. Their founder Rakesh Vallil is simply awesome. The support team is also nothing short of super ninjas. They moved my entire friggin course from Teachable to NewZenler.

Here’s the exact process you need to follow to move your content from teachable/thinkific to NewZenler. Rakesh has been very responsive in the private facebook group and has been listening to seasoned course creators like us to implement features that matter to us.

In the end, Rakesh has been able to create a platform that all of us imagined. NewZenler has every feature on top of what Teachable/Thinkific offer in their $99 pro plan.

And this is just the beginning, his ambitious plans include adding

On top of everything else that NewZenler can already do.