Hello! I recently moved all my freelance courses and memberships from Teachable to Podia (here they are in their happy new home!). I’m going to share why, but probably more importantly for those of you who have googled ‘how to move from Teachable to Podia’, how!
Why I decided to leave Teachable, and choosing which platform to move to
My break up with Teachable was a long one. I’d been feeling low-key fed up of Teachable for a while. It frustrated me that they had an app that they then just…stopped supporting. Which meant that half of my course content wasn’t accessible on it. I didn’t feel like there was a lot of customisation options to make the school and courses look really great.
But for me, it was changing the prices and packages at very short notice. I’d been a customer for many years, back when it was originally called Fedora, and had built up quite a lot of mini courses and resources. Then after several days of creating another one, I discovered when I tried to publish it that they were limiting me to 5 courses (it was unlimited before). Which I’d exceeded. And the jump to the next tier didn’t make financial sense. They didn’t actually announce this change until the day after I did this, so it was frustrating to have spent all that time creating and then not being able to publish it.
2023 has definitely been the year that a lot of online platforms have cut their packages and upped their prices. And I get that. Cost of living sucks. But doing this with very little prior warning, and to people who had spent years building with them, was the final straw for me.
I’d already been using Podia as a user for a couple of other courses and liked it. Then two experts I know and trust recommended it too. I weighed up lots of the other options, but Podia felt good, and I liked their road map for the future too. The fact that they had a community hub that was updated regularly also felt good. I value transparency and I felt like I got that with Podia. So far, the whole process has been great, and I’d happily recommend them (in fact, I have an affiliate link here for Podia if you want it).
But I was dreading moving it all. Thankfully, I have an amazing team (especially Jo Shock!)
Here’s what that move looked like.
Step 1: Transferring the courses from Teachable to Podia:
Transferring my courses from Teachable was a nice, straightforward process for my team. Podia makes it easy to copy and paste text, as well as to upload videos and files.
As part of the transfer, I took the opportunity to refresh the courses by checking any information that was out of date, e.g. references to old social media platforms or links that didn’t work anymore.
Once the courses were published on Podia, the next job was to hunt down every link I’d used for Teachable and replace them with links to the Podia courses. This included links on my website, in email welcome sequences, and of course within courses to point to other courses. I wish I’d previously used redirects like PrettyLink for every Teachable link, but you live and learn! I’ve implemented this for Podia though, so if I ever decide to change platforms in future, I only have to update the link in one place.
The last piece of the puzzle was setting up community membership plans for the Freelance Business Lounge, and giving them access to all of my courses. So when someone joins the Lounge they get access to every single course. As part of the membership, I had to choose between using the community chat function in Podia or to keep the membership on Facebook. I ultimately decided to stick with Facebook as we’re all happy there for now, though it’s good to know that Podia have that option for the future. And in fact, I’ve since launched The Freelance Lunch Club and I’m finding the community function really useful for updating everyone on call details and replays.
Step 2: Transferring customers from Teachable to Podia
With the content ready to go, I created a transfer timeline with my team (using Notion’s handy timeline feature). The timeline included:
- When course customers would be transferred
- When Lounge members would be transferred
- We then worked back to decide what and how to communicate with everyone, to give plenty of time for communications.
- Who to transfer – we decided to move customers who had bought accessed a course in the last 5 years. Although I’ve been selling courses for longer than this, we decided there needed to be a cut off somewhere.
Challenges of moving from Teachable to Podia
Having course participants AND a membership made the transfer steps a little tricky, as I didn’t want members’ inboxes to be flooded with access emails to every single course. So it was important to get them transferred first. However, as this required each member to sign up themselves, there was a certain amount of chasing involved!
The other challenge with the Lounge members was the range of renewal dates and prices that members had on Teachable. I decided the move to Podia was a good time to standardise both, so now there’s just one monthly price and one annual price. It was important to communicate this change carefully to the current members to make sure everyone understood and was happy with the changes to the membership. To help the transition, I decided to offer all current members two months of free access to the Lounge. It was over the summer holidays, so it made sense as I was also going to be around a bit less.
I expected to have an influx of queries during the transfer – How do I sign up to this? Who are you again? Why are you sending me this? But in the end, there was relatively little confusion. Those who are still interested in accessing their course(s) have signed up and those who aren’t any longer, haven’t. I’m ok with that because they’ve already got some value out of the course when they purchased it on Teachable and they’ve moved past needing it now. I was really happy to see that the vast majority moved over to Podia and signed up. I was a little worried we’d lose a lot of people (especially as a lot of my community are neurodivergent and it’s a few extra steps).
The biggest challenge was getting everyone to sign in and start their free two month trial. One thing we didn’t realise is that if people signed in at the end of August, rather than the start of June, their two months would start then. We did manage to work around that though.
Summary (and handy checklist!)
Moving your content and customers from one platform to another has many moving parts involved, but with a little planning, it doesn’t have to be painful. Here’s a quick summary of the steps:
- Decide on the platform to move to
- Check the plans against each other to make sure it’s all possible
- Collate all your previous course content to move across
- Optional: Update your course content where possible
- Setup the courses in Podia and create the payment links
- Setup voucher codes if necessary for students moving over
- While doing all this, keep your students in the loop and let them know you’ll be moving them over and what they should expect. You may want to do this a couple of times
- For courses that have already been purchased, you can add them as customers without going through the payment process, so they should just get an email asking for them to create an account and login
- For subscribers, make sure they’ve all signed in to their new Podia accounts and activated their memberships (including adding in their bank details)
- Update any links that point to the courses, e.g. website, email sequences, social media links
- Set aside time during the transfer to answer customer queries.