How to validate your email course idea (and guarantee signups before launch)
The 3-step Progressive Validation framework.
Welcome to issue #002 of The Creator-Educator Club. Every Sunday, I send proven strategies from top creator-educators to help you build a high-impact email course so you can scale your knowledge business faster. Subscribe below so you won’t miss the next issues.
This issue is presented by: Email Course Blueprint
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Have you decided to build an email course?
Great choice!
It’s the most powerful asset you can build to grow your knowledge business on autopilot.
But just as you open your laptop ready to start building, something in your head is nagging you.
Is this the right topic? Will my audience care? What if no one signs up?
That quiet little voice is questioning your decision like when you just ordered the new seasonal drink at Starbucks and wish you had gone with your usual latte.
Building in the dark costs you hours of wasted work
Not knowing if your course idea is worth pursuing is an expensive challenge.
You can end up spending 20+ hours crafting the perfect email sequence only to launch to crickets.
Without validation, your course is a gamble.
The most obvious approach most creator-educators take is to ask on social media:
“If I were to build an email course about [INSERT TOPIC], would you be interested?”
While this seems logical, the responses are unreliable.
Without real commitment, people say “yes” just to be nice.
But there’s a better way.
Top creator-educators don’t see validation as a one-time checkpoint but an ongoing process that evolves as they build.
They validate:
Before building
While building
After the first version is ready
That’s the pattern I observed from their course creation journey and turned into a simple framework.
Here’s how you can use it to make sure what you build is something your audience actually wants.
The 3-step Progressive Validation framework
1. Start an email waitlist from day one
Your first step in building a successful email course isn’t structuring your course or drafting your emails.
Instead, it’s building a waitlist.
A simple coming soon landing page to collect new emails or a link trigger in your email to tag subscribers who clicked is more than enough.
This gives you a list of people who are genuinely interested before you even start building.
While top creator-educators use this strategy for paid courses, it works just as well with free email courses.
Kieran Drew built a waitlist for his first-ever course, High Impact Writing, three months before launch. After promoting it over five emails, 373 people had already joined. If that’s not a clear signal of demand, I don’t know what is.
Starting with a waitlist lets you gauge initial interest through the number of signups.
And the earlier you start, the more potential students you can gather feedback from later.
2. Build your course in public
Once you start building, share your progress publicly.
This isn’t just about posting random screenshots like what many think of building in public.
It’s about previewing different aspects of your course to see if they resonate with your audience:
Course title you’ll use
Key topics you’ll cover
Email format you’ll stick with
Approach/framework you’ll teach
Examples you’ll include in each lesson
Janice shared the potential course outline when she started building Clutter to Clarity in Notion Roadmap. This brought in lots of comments that showed her exactly which part resonated and which needed rethinking.
By regularly sharing behind-the-scenes content, you’ll get a decent amount of early feedback to validate your course.
3. Organise a feedback round with beta students
After your first version is ready, invite potential students to test your course.
You’ll get clearer feedback on whether your course could solve their problem once they experience it from start to finish.
A few tips to consider:
Be specific about what you want reviewed
Set a specific deadline for them to return feedback
When the first version of Email Course Blueprint was ready, I invited my audience to become early learners for the course (back when I was building on X). Eventually, eight people joined and helped me refine the course to better align with their needs.
Not only will you get a decent amount of detailed feedback to validate and improve your course, you’ll also get to collect testimonials for your launch.
Final words
Progressive Validation helps you continuously validate your course idea and make sure it’s something worth pursuing:
Before building → Email waitlist
While building → Building in public
After the first version is ready → Feedback round
The principle is simple:
Get real evidence of interest before investing your time in building your course.
Next time you’re building an email course (or any digital product), give this framework a try.
It’ll prevent your effort from going to waste and give you the confidence that you’re building something your audience actually wants.
See you next Sunday,
Beer
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop them in the comments.
Whenever you’re ready, here are two ways I can help you:
Join Email Course Blueprint, a free 5-day email course that teaches you step-by-step how to build an engaging email course from scratch
Book my 1:1 consulting call, where I can give you specific, personalised advice on building an email course that’s tailored to your knowledge business
Beer! Great to see you here. I'm looking forward to following your progress here. It wasn't long ago that we connected on Twitter (though it seems like an eternity relatively speaking).
Thanks for these tips!