How COVID Jumpstarted the Businesses of Many Online Course Creators

Day after day for the past month, Heights Platform has seen record traffic numbers both from creators and students. As a result, some planned performance improvements became more immediately necessary to handle the increased traffic.

Those improvements have been recently released in an update that significantly improved site loading speed for course creators by as much as 2x in many areas. This update also included a major feature to help our creators from 100+ countries reach a more global audience — language localizations for the student experience. We’re happy to announce that Heights Platform now supports 19 different languages!

Many services like ours have seen a massive increase in traffic as a result of COVID. Shopify recently shared how they are experiencing Black Friday levels of traffic every day: https://twitter.com/jmwind/status/1250816681024331777

As we help thousands of businesses to move online, our platform is now handling Black Friday level traffic every day!

It won't be long before traffic has doubled or more.

Our merchants aren't stopping, neither are we. We need 🧠to scale our platform.https://t.co/e2JeyjcEeC pic.twitter.com/6lqSrNUCte

— Jean-Michel Lemieux (@jmwind) April 16, 2020

This time has certainly been difficult for everyone. Social distancing constraints necessitated by the pandemic has made in person teaching and coaching impossible, giving some entrepreneurs and business owners the push that they needed to move their training business online.

What is most impressive to us is not the numbers of new creators moving online around the world, but the speed at which these creators have been able to convert their training into an online course and launch it. It has been truly inspiring for our team to see the level of success some of these new online course creators are experiencing when bringing their expertise online.

We’ve seen some new creators accomplish these outstanding highlights in the past month:

• Getting 1000 new students in less than a week!
• Earning five figures in sales in a single day, within a month of launching on Heights Platform.
• Launching multiple online courses in a membership program, without previous experience, in less than a month.

How quickly these creators were able to take their online course from setup to making their first sale is a testament both to how entrepreneurs can make things happen when constraints force them to take action, and to Heights Platform’s ease of use.

Acquiring 1000 students in a week, or doing five figures in revenue during a launch day is certainly an exceptional result, but it wasn’t only a few that shared in the success. Many new online course businesses have seen modest moments of success in the past month, such as getting their first sale within a month of getting started. The feeling after getting that first sale and the motivation it brings is impactful enough to push new creators all-in on their online course businesses.

See our article: How to Stay Motivated Before Making Your First Online Course Sale for more.

The types of new online course businesses started in the past month generally weren’t based around traditional education subjects. While we did have some that were, as a platform our focus is geared towards independent entrepreneurs and small businesses teaching creative subjects. Here’s an example of online course topics we saw a surge of in the past month:

• Fitness: Yoga, Pilates, Martial Arts, Personal Trainers
• Business: Startup Programs, Entrepreneurship Coaching, Online Marketing, Online Advertising
• Art: Music Production, Drawing & Painting, Programming, Video Production
• Health: Nutrition, Acupuncture, Training related to dealing with COVID

Has COVID forced your training and coaching to move exclusively online? We’ve seen many creators with record revenue and student numbers over the past month. If you are one of those creators, we’d love to help share your story. Please tell us how the pandemic has impacted your online course business.

Are you considering building an online course, but haven’t started yet? Well, now is a better time than ever to be an online course creator. Get started today: