Tiny Courses MVP

After some initial market research, James had found an opportunity to create a simple course builder for people who wanted to monetize their knowledge & experience.

As we dug in deeper we soon realised that people wanted something as easy to set up as a blog, but didn’t want to compromise on the design quality.

A big issue people had with the current solutions out there was how difficult it was to get started. They mentioned all the hoops they had to jump through, just to set up a simple course, which often led them to giving up.

We knew this was a key piece of the core experience. So we stripped everything back to it’s core to deliver a simple set up that still allowed the user to get a feel for the visual style of their course.

We wanted to create a base framework but also allow users to put their own stamp on their courses so we created a side panel that would give them a space to sell their course and also make it unique to them.

We’d heard a lot of people mention how they wished they could have the simplicity of a blog.

As we dug in deeper, they talked about how the current course builders feel overly complex and how it’s hard to see how it all fits together. We wanted to create a natural writing experience, that had a clear connection with the customers experience of the course.

When we spoke to potential users about how the created their content, a great writing experience was key. We often heard that people would use tools like Medium because of their writing experience and then copy and paste it over.

Another interesting thing we heard was how people would also have a secondary space to think, like notion or apple notes. They wanted to explore ideas without interfering with their content. So we created a scratch pad on the right hand side for this space.

As with any MVP the critical thing is keeping the focus on what you need to ship. In order to do this we needed to say no to a lot of things we wanted to do.

The ability to say no comes from a deep understanding of what the core value is that you need to deliver, and this was key in shipping the MVP on time and getting enough understanding that this solution could work.

We got there with this version and I’m working together with James to start on the next version of Tiny Courses.