Introduction
When you’re working on an online training business, it’s easy to think your biggest goal is to get more customers.
You could spend months polishing your website, designing your brand, creating content, building your audience, and planning the perfect ad campaigns… but you may be making these decisions based on assumptions.
However, your first customers show you something that assumptions and planning can’t: what actually happens when real people use what you’ve created.
Those first users can show you what’s working, what’s confusing, what they actually value, and where they need more help. They may even describe your offer better than you did. Whether they’re paying customers, beta users, or people you’ve invited to test your program, they can help you work out the kinks before you put more people through the same experience.
That’s why your first few customers aren’t necessarily about growth, they’re your feedback team.
Let’s look at three ways to leverage that early feedback.
1. Create Clarity
When real people start going through your training, you may discover that what you thought was important isn’t actually where people needed the most help.
For example, imagine you’re a fashion designer creating an online course about designing and sewing your own clothing. You spend weeks creating lessons about developing a clothing collection because you believe your students need to understand the full design process. You have a few people go through the course, but you discover that they aren’t struggling with the overall design process nearly as much as you expected. Instead, they’re having trouble choosing the right fabrics, adjusting patterns for different body types, and understanding how to keep their finished garments looking consistent and professional.
Now you’ve leveled up from what you assumed your students needed to what your students are actually telling you they need.
You don’t need a bunch of customers to start learning either, a small group could show patterns that help you decide what to keep, what to change, and what isn’t worth building at all.
Launch it, get the reps in, pay attention to what happens, and make adjustments from there.
2. Tweak Your Systems and Content
Once people start using your product, your users uncover the things you couldn’t see on your own. A lesson might need another example. A download might be confusing. A step you thought was obvious might need more explanation. These aren’t necessarily major problems, they’re just kinks you need to work out before you scale.
For example, imagine you’re launching an online guitar course and invite 15 students from your email list to try the first version. During the first week, a couple of students tell you they’re struggling with a particular chord exercise. Others aren’t sure how long they should practice before moving on to the next lesson.
Instead of waiting until your next course version months from now, you make a few small changes – you record a quick demo video, clarify practice instructions, and add some text explaining when to move forward. Now the most common problem areas have been taken care of before the doors were opened to a much larger audience.
The goal is to listen, prioritize, and fix the things that matter most.
3. Improve Your Marketing
Your first customers can tell you why they signed up, what problem they were trying to solve, what they liked most, and what results they experienced.
For example, imagine you’re a newsletter writer teaching a course on building a successful Substack. You describe your course as a “newsletter growth strategy” but your students might say “this finally helped me figure out what I actually want to write about and gave me a system for publishing every week.” That experience is useful marketing language.
Your students have gone through the transformation your course provides firsthand, and they can tell you about your course in a way that you could not have thought of yourself:
- What made them sign up
- The problem(s) they were trying to solve
- What almost stopped them from buying
- What they found most valuable
- What results they experienced
- What they wish they had known before starting
So instead of trying to guess what your audience wants to hear, let your users help you discover it. Their feedback can improve both what you sell and how you sell it. Plus, if your first customers are happy with your course they may share their success stories (and you could use those when you’re ready to market to a larger audience).
Summary
Your first few customers can teach you more than months of planning ever will, so make sure to use their feedback to create clarity, work out the kinks, and strengthen your marketing before you scale.
Feedback first, improvement second, then growth.
Next Steps:
- Start with a small group: Invite a handful of students, clients, or beta users to experience your training before you scale.
- Ask for feedback: Check in with them before, during, and after the experience to find out what’s working and where they’re getting stuck.
- Work out the kinks: Prioritize the biggest problems and make the small fixes to improve the experience for future users.
- Document what you learn: Save the questions, feedback, results, and exact language your customers use so you can improve both your product and your marketing.
- Scale what works: Once you’ve addressed the major gaps and have a clearer offer, start opening the doors to a larger audience.
