I wrote this piece over here for our company blog. Some of it is specific to Trek, our course hosting platform, but a pretty important message for any entrepreneur who pays for software to help run their business.
When I met my wife, I was pretty certain she was the one for me from our first date. But I didn’t whisk her onto a plane for a Vegas wedding chapel that night and merge our checking accounts the next day. For a number of reasons. At least one being it would have included kidnapping and robbery charges.
Instead, I spent a year getting to know her, seeing how we’d get along, and having some deep philosophical conversations to make sure we were actually on the same path. Life is long, but it moves fast and if two people who are supposed to be working together are pointed different directions, trouble ensues.
Now, picking a software company to serve some portion of your business is a little different, but not that much! It’s often really expensive, filled with complex settings and data entry. And if it all goes wrong later, untangling can feel a lot like a divorce. (It’s not you, it’s your half-implemented feature that always breaks. I swear!)
The worst part is the wedding requires almost no forethought. Just enter your credit card info and you’re off to the races. Like a one-night stand that somehow turned into 30-years of disappointment.
When you’re looking for software to fix a problem in your business, it’s easy to jump right into “checkbox mode.” You have an idea of what you want, and you set out to find the platform that has all the features.
Sometimes there aren’t many options, so you have to take whatever’s available, even if it isn’t perfect. (My poor wife...)
But what about when there are lots of options?
When many solutions exist and most of them do the same thing, you have to conjure up some new boxes to check to narrow down your choices.
Eventually, you pick one. But was it the right one? Did you go through a proper courting phase or did you jump right into bed?
Technology—especially software platforms—change all the time. There are a number of us and we’re constantly building new features, changing old ones, and generally trying to create the best products we can.
What assurance do you have that the answer you come to today will still be the right one tomorrow? How do you know that you and your platform are on the same path? Do you even know what path you’re on?
If you want to pick one that will grow with you and serve your needs for the long-term without a messy divorce down the road, the answers to those questions are important, right?
You need to know why the team you’re partnering with is doing what they do. What’s their philosophy?
So, what’s the “Trek philosophy”?
We built Trek to solve our own problem. We’re bloggers who wanted to offer great courses to our audiences and, despite the million solutions that existed, we never found the one that did what we wanted the way we wanted: make our students more successful.
Not even one that came close, actually. If we had, we wouldn’t be here.
We created Trek because we saw a huge gap in the market of course platforms. Today, despite many players, only two categories seem to fit:
- Hardcore institutional software: These platforms are built for universities, priced for universities, and you wouldn’t want them for your blog-based business even if you could have them.
- Marketing software: These plugins and platforms have fancy page builders, shopping carts, and membership features. They do just enough to let you say you offer education, but they don’t really care about learning. They care about selling.
We’ve always believed the best way to build and market a great education business is to actually build great education for online learners.
That’s why our philosophy is student-focused. Every time we build a new feature or update an existing one, we ask ourselves, “How is this going to help teachers actually create better learning experiences?”
So many others in our field are focused on selling “business opportunities.” They focus on how their features make it easier to sell your courses and earn money. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to market. I only use it to point out how we’re different.
As a blogger and a teacher, you’re our customer, but we want to focus on your customers. And we think if we build things that improve your customers’ lives in a meaningful way and help them learn, you’ll make a lot of money and be pretty happy with us. We want teachers who truly care about their students first to use Trek.
Does that mean we don’t care about making money? Hell no! We’ve got mouths to feed, too!(Well, technically dog mouths. Slightly lower stakes.) We just think great marketing and sales platforms already exist, and our job is to help you deliver great education—the real money-maker behind it all.
Online courses are hot right now. Everyone and their brother is trying to sell one. And for good reason—they work!
We’re simply making a bet that when the “build an online course” gold rush starts to settle back down to “a good business opportunity if you know what you’re doing” levels—and students are savvy enough to know the difference between great education and poor education with great marketing—Trek will still be the platform that serious bloggers and teachers use to turn their knowledge and experience into life-changing education.
That’s where we’re focused because that’s what we care about.
Look hard enough at any software you use to run your business and it won’t be hard to see what path they’re on. When you’re picking the software that will run your business, take enough time to get to know who you’re working with. Make sure you’re headed the same direction.
Everyone builds features. What matters is why they build them. It tells you where they’re probably headed next.
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