First, the part that cannot move
There's a piece of what you do that won't go online, and pretending otherwise wastes everybody's time. When you see a knee rolling in and put a hand on somebody's hip to fix it, that is not information being transferred. That is you, there, watching. No video reproduces it and no software replaces it, and the people selling you course platforms are usually careful not to mention it.
So here is the honest frame. Everything you know that is the same for everyone - the order the programme runs in, the warm-up, what to do on the days you don't see them, why week three feels harder than week two - can leave the room. The part that needs your eyes stays in it. What follows is four ways to move the first part, and they aren't ranked, because which one is right depends on facts about your week that I don't have.
One: put more hours in the diary
The first option is the one nobody writes an article about. Add a class. Take two more one-to-one slots. Open the Saturday morning you've been protecting.
It deserves more respect than it gets. It works this month, it needs no new skill, nothing has to be filmed or written or uploaded, and you're already good at it. If your hall has space on a Thursday and there are people who would come, that's a better use of the next four weeks than anything else on this list.
What it can't do is grow past a diary. Every hour you sell has to be an hour you're standing up in, which means the thing you sell and the thing you've least of are the same thing. And an hour is not a fixed quantity either: six of twelve turning up is its own problem and has its own article. For what it's worth, I've never had a convincing explanation for why the six in the morning class fills and the seven in the evening one doesn't. Evening classes lose to traffic, dinner, weather and whatever is on television. Six in the morning has no competition.
Two: put it out free, and get found
Second option: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. Film the mobility routine, the five-minute warm-up, the form check nobody asks for but everybody needs.
This is the only option here that finds strangers, and it's very good at that. Nothing else on this page will put you in front of somebody who has never heard your name. If your problem is that not enough people know you exist, this is the answer, and it's free apart from your time.
It's poor at exactly one thing, and it's the thing this article is about. A feed has no order. The person who found you yesterday and the person who has been following for eight weeks are shown the same clip, and neither of them is being taken through anything. There is no week one and no week six. There is no way to tell who is still with you. And the list of people who watch you belongs to the platform, not to you, which is an argument I've made at length elsewhere and won't repeat here.
Three: sell the plan as a document
The third option is the one most instructors reach for first, because it's the shortest distance between what you know and money. Write the twelve-week programme as a PDF. Sell it for forty dollars. Email it.
If you already have people who trust you, this works, and it works this week. There is nothing wrong with it as a first thing to sell.
It goes wrong later, in three predictable ways. An attachment has no memory, so the person who bought it in March and lost it in an inbox is gone and you'll never know. You can't see whether anyone got past page four, which means you can't improve it. And when you change something, nobody who already bought it ever sees the change. A document is a snapshot of what you knew on the day you exported it.
Four: somewhere they log in, with an order and a date
The fourth option is a course platform, and the only thing it really adds over the document is structure. Lessons come in order. Week three arrives in week three instead of all at once on day one. You can see who has opened what. Everybody who bought it is in one place, and when you rewrite the warm-up, everyone has the new warm-up.
That is less exciting than the sales pages for these things suggest, and it's also the whole point. The difference between a plan people buy and a programme people finish is almost entirely whether the thing had a shape and a schedule.
What the building actually takes
The old objection to all this was that making the course was a bigger job than teaching the class. That has changed and it's the part worth knowing about. You describe what you teach in a sentence or two, say how many sections you want and who it's for, and the AI course builder writes the first draft - sections, lesson titles and the words inside them - in about ninety seconds.
What comes back is a draft and it's meant to be. It doesn't know your hall, your people or the fact that you always do the hip work before the squats. You will rewrite most of it. But rewriting is a job you can do at nine in the evening with a cup of tea, and facing an empty page is not.
The parts a six-week programme needs
Lessons can be released on a schedule, so somebody who buys on the fifteenth gets week one on the fifteenth and week two seven days later, rather than bingeing the lot and vanishing.
Habit challenges with daily check-ins cover the days between sessions, which for most fitness programmes is where the work is. Automatic emails go out when somebody finishes a section or when they have gone quiet. Progress shows on your dashboard, so you can see the person who stopped in week two - and why people stop in week two is a whole subject on its own. There is one-to-one chat, so a Thursday question about knee pain arrives in one place instead of turning up on WhatsApp, Instagram and email on three separate days, each time as though it were the first. And there's a community, if you want the people doing the programme to be able to see each other.
Who this is not for
- If the value of what you do is your hands and your eyes in the room, a course is homework beside your sessions, not a substitute for them. Plenty of good instructors don't want the homework job, and that's a complete answer.
- If what you need is a booking and payments system for in-person sessions and nothing else, there are apps that do only that and they do it better than a course platform will.
- If you expect the course to find its own buyers, it will not. Describing who it's for narrowly enough that one person recognises herself is a separate job from building the thing, and it's the harder half.
- If you want funnels, ad tracking and upsell sequences, we do not build those on purpose, and the bigger platforms that do will suit you better.
What it costs
Forty-seven dollars a month, one plan, no tiers to work out. That covers 1,000 active students, unlimited courses and products, hosted video with 1TB of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder, communities and chat. Extra video bandwidth is $10 per TB if you ever need it. We take no cut of your sales at all - Stripe takes its own 2.9% and 30c, the same as it would anywhere, and that's the only fee in the chain.
Justine Lette, who runs Hypnosis New Zealand, was paying over $100 a month elsewhere and using a fraction of what she was paying for. That is a different trade to yours and the arithmetic is the same one.
The trial is thirty days and doesn't ask for a card. If you buy and change your mind, there's a thirty-day money-back guarantee. Take the six weeks you already teach in a room, put it somewhere with a login and a schedule, and see what it looks like by the end of the month.