How do I get started as an indie teacher?

 

Is your primary goal a business or a hobby?

Indie teaching can be either a hobby or a business. Your choice of whether your objective is to make your indie teaching a hobby or to make money has important considerations for other decisions you make. If your goal is to share your expertise and passion with others and do not intend to receive any compensation, that is a hobby. For tax purposes, the distinction between a hobby and a business is very important. As an indie teacher, you can publish books and courses for free. This is a cheaper hobby than many as your primary expenditure will be time.

For those of who have bills to pay, indie teaching can be a business that makes money. You can make money directly by being paid for what you know, or you can get paid for other products and services and use your expertise for content marketing. In the latter case, you give away courses, books, and other resources to develop an audience that buys other products from you or from your referral. These are not mutually exclusive options.

I have tried to find a way to describe this using a different term than “business,” because I know that many teachers are allergic to the idea of commerce. The reality is that if you are making money, then it is business. Business is not inherently bad, though unfortunately it is often practiced in a way that can be problematic. Indie teaching is an opportunity to conduct a learning business ethically and that creates value for the learner. If you feel that education and business cannot be mixed, then indie teaching can be pursued as a hobby. Another model is to use a patronage model that accepts donations rather than charges for services. Indie teaching is also not for every teacher.

How can I make money with online classes?

Many people make money from teaching online courses, as can you. Here are a few of the business models for making money from online classes.

  • Advertising: advertise on your site or in your course
  • Registration Fees: change learners to access your course or other resources
  • Subscriptions: offer a recurring charge for an ongoing subscription or membership
  • Selling other products: Give away courses for free to increase sales of books, services, or other product.
  • Affiliate Services: Give away your courses and sell other people’s products using affiliate services like Amazon and Click Bank.
  • Pay What You Want: Offer learners the option to pay what they want for courses and other materials.
  • Patronage/Donations: Offer the opportunity to make donations to offset the expense of your creative efforts.

What if I don’t want to be an entrepreneur?

Do not believe the mythology of the entrepreneur. The myth of the entrepreneur is a brilliant college drop-out creating the next Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Google in a garage somewhere. Most entrepreneurs are over 40. They are industry professionals that have an idea that their employer does not want to invest in. Another aspect of the entrepreneur myth is someone who raises money to invest in a company with no product but is growing with employees. Most entrepreneurs are small business owners with only a few employees if any. Their goal is to create a great product that serves their customers. It is not to create a company that they can sell and never have to work again.

An indie teacher can be an entrepreneur, looking to build a business, but more often the goal is to be an independent creator sharing expertise with others. You do not need to raise money, hire employees, or build systems to scale your business. You need to build your courses and share them with an audience who values them. I will teach you systems and methods to minimize the amount of time spent on the “business of learning” so you can focus on the “creation of learning.”

How did I become an accidental entrepreneur?

I was an accidental entrepreneur, and I did not even realize it at the time.

What is an accidental entrepreneur? Someone who launches their own business out of necessity and not through an innate desire to start a business. When we think of entrepreneurs, we often think of people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs. These are people who knew from a young age they wanted to create their own businesses and relentlessly pursued that ambition.

Two of my favorite classical entrepreneurs are Tony Hsieh and Chandler Bolt. Hsieh started his first business when still in junior high making custom pins he sold via mail order. Today he is the CEO of Zappos. In between he went to Harvard and started an online advertising business that he sold for millions. Bolt is a bestselling author who teaches others how to author and publish books. He is a college drop-out who realized early in his education that college did not have the same focus on how to start a business that he had. These two business leaders exemplify the ideal of the entrepreneur driven to start businesses and focused on that end goal.

The accidental entrepreneur starts a business because of circumstances. Starting a business is not the goal but the vehicle to achieving another goal. The accidental entrepreneur has something to share with an audience and are unable to find a better platform than starting their own business.

I did not intend to start my own business. Since my first year of college my career aspirations were to become a professor. I moved from my undergraduate degree in sociology into a graduate program in urban, technological, and environmental planning. As a part-time job in grad school, I started working for the university IT department as a consultant. After three years of grad school, I came to a fork in the road. I was offered a fellowship to do research for my dissertation, and I was offered a full-time IT position at a consortium of universities and research organizations funded by Congress to make data and information on the human dimension of global change available over the Internet.

The timing of this opportunity was important. The year was 1992. The Internet was on the brink of becoming the phenomena that it is today. I made the calculated decision that the work experience would inform my teaching and research, so I left Ann Arbor coursework completed. I could always finish my doctorate, but this was a unique opportunity.

My calculations were correct. Over the next few years I was in the front lines of the Internet revolution. I had the opportunity to learn about marketing, developing partnerships with a global network of organizations, leading teams, and developing applications and information products. I presented at international conferences including a United Nations meeting. I explained what the Internet was to a U.S. Senator. I learned a great deal, and slowly I completed the requirements for my degree, earning the distinction of “ABD” also known as “all but dissertation.”

After a few years, I left the organization I was with to apply what I had learned to a new context…community-based health care reform. Unfortunately, that position did not work out, and I found myself in a new city with technical skills that were at the bleeding edge.

Two important things happened. First, I started my own business doing consulting and developing web sites. Second, I was offered my first part-time college teaching position. Over the next couple of years, I had both a successful business and the start of a teaching career. In time, a full-time opportunity came along, and I sold my business to pursue my dream job as a professor.

Fast forward twenty plus years, and I have had a great career in higher education. I have taught many students online and face-to-face around the globe. I have worked with thousands of faculty and served a variety of administrative roles. In early 2019, the university where I was President closed, I have become once more an accidental entrepreneur.

My doctorate was in planning, and I have taught classes in futuring. I have also taught courses in higher education planning. Through this lens, I have a strong point of view on the future of higher education. On the one hand, the future demands that people learn new skills and acquire new knowledge. At the same time, traditional models of higher education appear to be not well-suited to meet the needs of the new economy. The idea of indie teaching originated from these observations.

What are the different flavors of entrepreneurship?

In a guest post at Startup Bros, Hannah Corbertt has a list of over twenty different flavors of entrepreneur. (See: https://startupbros.com/entrepreneur-glossary/)

One of Corbett’s 20 flavors is the “infopreneur.” Infopreneurs build businesses based on information products. These can take the form of books, training, online courses, or a variety of other forms.

I prefer a new term…”knowledge-preneur.” Why? We are drowning in information. The value comes from knowledge…the application of information.

Recently I heard an education consultant talking about how rather than going to college someone could just go to the library and read for four years since all the information was in the library. This is ridiculous.

Traditional publishing lags the discovery of knowledge. Books and journal articles have been in development for years before they are published. Even if we broaden this to reading books in the library and online information sources there are four major problems:

  • The information will contradict. How does the learner know which information is correct?
  • There is more information available than can be processed. How does the learner know what to study?
  • How does the learner know how to turn information into action?
  • What feedback does the learner have on misunderstandings?

In higher education, the professor is not simply a source of information. The professor curates information to point out what is important to know and what is correct. The professor is an expert who can model how to apply information to solve problems. The professor provides coaching and motivation to help learners grow.

A “knowledge-preneur” follows the model of the professor, curating information, modeling problem solving, and developing expertise through coaching.

The “professor-entrepreneur” extends this concept and reflects the expertise that a professor has both in a body of knowledge and the ability to teach that knowledge to others. Over the last thirty years, many professors have reluctantly become “professor-entrepreneurs.” With fewer full-time positions than candidates for those positions, professors have had to find their own teaching positions, often at multiple schools.

Indie teachers are the next stage of the “professor-entrepreneur” evolution. Going beyond being an educational freelancer serving at many institutions, they create and offer their own courses.

What is mission-driven entrepreneurship?

The classic entrepreneur is motivated by one thing: money. The primary objective is to make money, and the focus of entrepreneurship is how to start and take a business to earn massive profits.

Some entrepreneurs start out with money as their motivation and along the way discover a larger purpose. Ryan Levesque is a great example of this path. Levesque’s first business was selling jewelry and jewelry designs based on scrabble tiles. When that market disappeared, he offered training in memory. Along the way, Levesque developed what he calls the “Ask Method” of marketing. Today, his business is focused on sharing his method with other entrepreneurs and developing software and other systems around this methodology. He makes more money than he did on his earlier businesses, but I think he would also talk about how much more meaningful his current work is.

One of the first pieces of advice that I give someone who is considering a career as a professor is that they need to be motivated because they have a passion to share their knowledge of a specific field with others. On an hourly basis, teaching is seldom a lucrative money-making opportunity.

Professor-entrepreneurs generally start with the mission in mind. They have a passion in their subject and in teaching that drives their entrepreneurial activity. Launching a business for them is about developing a platform for sharing their message more than it is to make money. Money is good too…but money alone is not going to be fulfilling to the professor-entrepreneur

I started my first business in 1996 because I had a deep knowledge of the Internet and the emerging World Wide Web. My passion was how these new technologies offered to democratize the sharing and publication of information. My doctoral dissertation focused on how cities could use a web site to building community and engage their citizens. My first business started with training on the web and web sites. I expanded into development and consulting and went on to develop web sites for schools and local government.

Today I find myself in a similar position. I have two decades of experience in online teaching and learning including administration. My current business development is based on a desire to help other professors develop their own platforms for sharing their message outside of traditional higher education. My mission is to provide indie teachers with the systems and support needed to be successful in connecting with their audience while achieving financial sustainability while being able to focus on the learning which is their mission and less on the administrative tasks of running a learning business.

How much capital will I need to start an indie teaching business?

Assuming you already have a computer and Internet access, you do not need any capital to offer courses online. I would recommend an investment in a domain name ($10/year) and G Suite from Google ($6/month). If that is too much, you can get by without these expenses.

The domain name allows you to have your own address online. The G Suite subscription allows you to use the domain for your email address. The email chris@chrisdavisphd.com is more professional than cmdavis@gmail.com even though they go to the same mailbox. The web site http://www.chrisdavisphd.com is better than http://drcmdavis.blogspot.com.

The primary form of capital will be sweat equity of your time and effort in creating materials. By working smart and using templates and structures from Indie Teaching, you can reduce the time involved. More importantly, you never want to invest energy in creating something that you have not first validated has an audience.

What is “bootstrapping”?

A common misconception about starting a business is that it requires capital resources to get started. While this is true if you are starting steel factory or a retail store that requires inventory, expertise-based businesses do not require these upfront investments. My first business with nothing more than a computer and Internet access. My business developing web sites was profitable from day one. The downside was that I had few business expenses to reduce what I owed in taxes. That is not a bad downside…it meant I was profitable from day one.

For many indie teachers, a goal is to not have a business. For them, going forward I will try not to use the term “business,” and instead refer to an “indie teaching gig.” A “gig” is a term that musicians use to refer to a paid “engagement” or performance usually for one performance. An “indie teaching gig” is a paid performance to teach not for an institution but on one’s own.

Not having upfront expenses allow you to bootstrap your indie teaching gig. You can use some of the incoming revenue to invest in marketing to expand your audience. In time, you may want to use others to perform some of the tasks that you do not enjoy or where you do not add value. The key is to not spend money that you do not have. Cash flow (having more money in the bank then you are spending) is key to success. Any operation can be profitable, but if it requires more cash than it has, then it will fail faster than if it was not profitable.

What does a university do for professors?

Every indie creator is faced with the “business” side of creation. Record labels, publishers, and movie studios were created to provide a way of managing the support systems of creation, so the artist did not need to be distracted. These businesses operate at scale. They skim a percentage off the top of each creator that they work with in order to pay for the accountants, marketers, and other business people. The need for scale drives industries include higher education towards standardization and away from creativity. It makes it hard for the education industry to meet the needs of niche audiences. This is part of the unique value that indie teachers can tap into for their own success.

It can be difficult to imagine teaching outside of a college or university. As teachers, many services and activities are done behind the scenes, allowing us to focus on teaching. As a former university president and administrator, I have been responsible for the operations of a university. Thinking of just the teaching role of a university, a university:

  • Recruits students: in business, this function is known as marketing and sales.
  • Provides infrastructure: whether online or face-to-face, teaching requires a classroom.
  • Student Service: advisors answer questions for students about tuition, what courses to take, and other questions that are beyond the scope of the classroom.
  • Credibility: universities invest significant effort in accreditation and building the brand of the university so that it is valued by students, alumni, and the broader community.
  • Credits and degrees: the currency of education are credits and degrees that have value in the wider world.
  • Training/support and community: faculty in a university are part of a community of colleagues and have access to training and supporting resources like professional development.
  • Curriculum: faculty working in departments determine the curriculum at the program and course level, and in some institutions instructional design support is provided especially for online courses.
  • Financing: universities take student money and handle billing and also provide access to financial aid.

Being an indie teacher means giving those support systems up, but technology and processes does not mean that the indie teacher has to be burdened by these distractions.

How does an indie teacher manage without a university?

Using the operations that a university provides as a framework, we can look at how an indie teacher can implement these processes:

  • Recruits students: a university needs thousands of students to achieve scale. An indie teacher needs many fewer students. Rather than sales and marketing, an indie teacher develops a relationship with an audience
  • Provides infrastructure: several options exist for online classrooms and publishing that do not require much to establish. Face-to-face indie classes can use meeting space in hotels and other facilities.
  • Student Service: indie teaching offerings are less complicated than a college degree, but an indie teaching has to be prepared to answer learner questions beyond the subject matter.
  • Credibility: an indie teacher develops credibility with their audience through writing and other resources. The indie teacher’s credibility is based solely on their work.
  • Training/support and community: indie teachers do not have a built-in community. At the Guild of Indie Teachers our goal is to provide support and opportunities for indie teachers to network.
  • Curriculum: for some, the opportunity to have full control over the curriculum is an advantage to indie teaching, but others will miss the structure.
  • Financing: indie teaching does not use financial aid, and online tools can make the process of collecting payments simple. Operating a university requires a great deal of overhead that the indie teacher does not have to replicate. Online services can also simplify these processes.

How do I identify an audience for my expertise?

One of the many cool things about the Internet is that it provides many options for identifying an idea for a course or book or validating your existing idea. The goal is to identify an audience in advance to any development, and then developing services to their needs.

The best way to do this is to research what people are searching for and reading about already and identify gaps in existing resources.

Sometimes though your idea is what is known as blue ocean without an existing audience actively searching for knowledge. This requires a different approach to validation.

Indie Teaching has resources to guide you through ideation to develop and validate your idea before investing significant time and energy.

How do I manage back office processes like billing, accounting, and other administrative functions?

The Internet makes these processes much easier than before the Internet.

Billing and many administrative processes are generally handled by a service. I use Acuity Scheduling for scheduling coaching sessions, and it also handles payments. Acuity collects money from clients and then pays me. I use Gumroad for digital materials like videos and documents. I sell books on Amazon. Teachable can handle payments as well as provide an LMS. Each of these services will take care of payments so you don’t have to worry about collecting credit card information or any other billing information. The fee for this service is usually quite small versus doing it yourself. These services also handle access to your offerings, including scheduling and delivery of products.

Each of these systems will track how much they have paid you, so you have a record of income at the end of the year. Unlike an employer, though, they do not withhold taxes. You will need to report your income and expenses to the IRS on your tax returns. Many accountants are available to assist you with this process. Since one of our objectives is to keep expenses low, this should be a simple reporting process.

Having employees or maintaining a physical inventory of goods to sell complicates these issues dramatically. As an indie teacher, though, this drama is avoided.

What technology do I need to know to create an indie teaching platform?

I started my professional career in IT, and I know all too well how IT can be a bottomless money and time pit. By keeping things simple and sticking to the essentials, though, these expenses can be avoided.

An indie teacher needs to be able to use email and a word processor. Presentation software (Powerpoint or Keynote) can be helpful. A variety of Internet applications will be needed, but most of these require the technical skills of completing a form. Publishing articles, books, and videos online requires very little expertise or expensive technology.

For those with the time and expertise, the options are unlimited. Just remember that the service being provided is learning and not technology.

Anyone who can use a learning management system (LMS) should have no problem with the technology of being an indie teacher.

Do I need a business plan?

I have a PhD in planning, and planning is near and dear to my heart. However, as an indie teacher, you do not need a business plan. The primary purposes of a business plan are to show others how your business will make money. This is important for investors, banks, and employees. As an indie teacher, though, you should not need any of these.

The processes provided by the Guild of Indie Teachers have planning built into them. As you make creative decisions, you will also be making decisions about how your business will operate including how much you should charge and how to build awareness of your offering. The guiding philosophy is to focus on creating learning experiences and not get bogged down in creating a business. If you create and offer great learning opportunities, then the business will take care of itself.

How do I name my indie teaching practice?

Do not spend much time on this. Unless you have a good reason, you should use your own name. My first business was Davis and Davis Associates. My current business is simply Chris Davis, PhD.

There are two important reasons to use this approach.

First, legally, you can operate a business under your own without any special filings. (Business licenses rules vary by state and local area, so you will need to do some research for where you live.) If you operate under a different name, you will need to file paperwork for a “DBA” (doing business as). Usually this is done with the county clerk, and it might be possible to do this online. Save yourself the time and expense by just using your name.

While you may not think of what you are doing as a business, in the eyes of the law, if you are providing a service that someone is paying for, you are involved in a business even if we call it a gig.

Second, from a marketing and branding perspective, it is just easier to use your name. Companies like Nike and Apple are well known today and have recognizable logos…but it costs time and money to build that type of identity. People will remember your name and associate it with you without a logo or other marketing devices.

It is easy to get distracted by trying to create the perfect logo. A logo, though, will not help you be successful with your teaching. Better to use your time and energy on more productive activities.

Contents

  1. The Indie Teaching Manifesto
  2. Why should I become an indie teacher?
  3. What would I do as an indie teacher?
  4. How do I get started as an indie teacher?
  5. How do I create learning products as an indie teacher?
  6. Ideation and Validation
  7. Design
  8. Build-out
  9. Publish-Launch

Join the free Guild of Indie Teaching.