From Meditation Teacher to eCourse Adventure Guide

The story begins in the year 2011.

I had facilitated more than 500 meditation workshops and circles over the course of two years and fulfilled a dream of guiding retreats in Peru, Hawaii, Mexico, Canada and more…

But I was burnt out.

I wasn’t fulfilled in my work anymore.

It was time for a change.

And so here I was, sitting in the mountains above Cusco, Peru.

I was in the midst of a personal ceremony with the plant medicine San Pedro.

This experience was a defining moment in my creative and entrepreneurial journey.

My epiphany.

My first task was to get clear on what my intentions were for my life moving forward.

Here’s what came through:

• More freedom with my time.
• The ability to impact more lives than I was able to with my small workshops and 1-1 clients.
• The ability to generate more income than I was able to by teaching in person.
• More time to pursue my dream of playing professional golf. (This is my second year playing pro!)

My epiphany happened in a single moment. My entire vision and path into the future came to me all at once. I could suddenly see what I was to do with crystal clarity.

The solution was for me to harness the power of the internet and create transformational learning experiences in the digital realm.

In that moment, I had no idea how to do auto-responders, let alone build entire courses or learning pathways.

But this was “IT!” The answer I’d been searching for…

I made a commitment to devote the next 5-years to JUST online courses and education. Truth betold, December of this year will be the 5-year mark since making that commitment…

After getting back from Peru, I scaled my teaching back from 250 workshops per year to about 6-12 per year.

I poured my heart, soul and all my energy into building my meditation courses.

My first sale was a game-changer!

I got started on my new path immediately, while on my retreat in Peru.

In fact, one day while filming a video lesson on site at my retreat space up in the mountains, an American who was staying down the road came by and watched what I was up to.

When I was done recording, he asked what I was filming for.

I told him, I was creating a 40 day meditation course.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a $100 bill and said he’d like to be my first student.

My jaw dropped.

It was THAT moment, that I knew I was on the right path.

Thank you David, wherever you are!

It began to spread.

After getting back from Peru, I spent the next 3-months figuring out how to create videos, make PDFs, set-up auto-responders, build a sales page. It felt like I was learning a foreign language.

My first launch was humble: 16 people and $1600 in sales.

But I was so stoked.

People were actually paying me money and I wasn’t tied down to my workshops.

EUREKA!

Launch by launch, my meditation programs started to spread.

Now, nearly 5-years later, my meditation courses and tracks have spread to more than 50 countries around the world.

Still today, I earn residual income from sales of those early programs.

Overall, 80-90% of my income comes from the internet.

I have clients who license my tracks for their companies.

I’m one of the top teachers on Omvana.com, one of the top meditation apps online.

And I am essentially a retired meditation teacher whose work is still growing and spreading around the globe.

It’s truly a dream come true.

Then came my first e-course creation client.

With the success of my meditation courses, word started to spread that I knew how to make eCourses.

Over the course of a few months I had about 10 people ask me how I built my courses.

At that time, I took on about 5 personal clients, helping them to build courses of their own.

Working closely with these clients, helped me to reverse engineer my own learning journey of building courses and facilitate that same process for them.

It was really fun for me to help pull out their brilliance and translate that into courses and learning paths for their students. I really enjoyed having the focus be on them and their students, rather than myself for a change.

I feel very proud of the work we did back then, especially for the limited knowledge-base I had to draw from at that time.

One of my first clients, Jannine Murray, has gone on to sell around 100,000 eCourses since!

Another one of my early clients turned her $7 eBook into a $250 multimedia eCourse.

Demand kept growing, so I built the eCourse Creation Blueprint.

This was my first attempt at building a course on building courses.

It was typical of all the others in the industry; powerpoints, PDFs and a private Facebook group.

It was not a work of art. I didn’t get super lit up about my day-to-day work.

I was hustling for sales and checking things off my to-do list.

Even though I was making money, it didn’t feel like I had “arrived” at my life’s work.

The bromance that birthed a behemoth.

I met Andy on my honeymoon in Hawaii in 2012.

We were both creative, entrepreneurial, conscious-living dudes who loved to geek out on online marketing, transformation and the world of internet businesses.

After meeting, we built a skype friendship over the course of a couple years.

I’d send him clients and hired him to build a couple platforms for me. We also chatted on skype almost weekly.

I was always impressed by his eye for design, knowledge of marketing and his ability to create really cool websites and platforms.

Finally, after 2 years getting to know each other, I asked Andy if he wanted to step in as an equal partner with my eCourse Creation Blueprint membership.

He said yes and came to Canada for what will go down in history as a pinnacle turning point in both of our lives.

The day the Great eCourse Adventure was born.

Around the 5th day of Andy’s two week trip to Salt Spring Island, BC, we were about to go into production mode for the upgraded eCourse Blueprint course.

However, fate had a different plan for us.

While standing on a mountain near my house, I turned to Andy and asked him if he would have purchased our course if finding it a few years prior, when he needed the information most.

He said, “NO!” and I said the same.

In that moment, we knew something had to change.

(You can listen to the full audio clip of this story below)

Back down to the house we went, wondering WTF we could create that would inspire us both to pull out our wallets and want to buy.

As an exercise in creativity, we started describing all the qualities of a course that would need to be in place in order to make us want to buy, and keep us around long enough to complete the course.

Here are a few of the points we came up with:

• It would need to be fun to go through and for us to create
• It would have to be a work of art, original and super unique
• It would need to have a community of really cool people built around it
• It would need to draw upon all our skills and interests in a creative way
• It would need to be a …… great e-course adventure!

When those words fell out of my mouth, my wife Celeste was upstairs and she yelled down at us, “I love that!”

On a piece of paper, we wrote down “The Great eCourse Adventure” and “eCourse Creation Blueprint” beside each other and asked ourselves, which one would we buy?

In that moment, the eCourse blueprint was dead and we set out to discover what this Great eCourse Adventure was.

The creative vortex opened up.

The next 10 days were the wildest whirlwind of inspiration, excitement, creativity and sleeplessness I think I’ve ever had.

By choosing, The Great eCourse Adventure, a portal opened up inside of us and the creative channels were fully activated.

Close to everything you see, feel and experience in the GEA came to us in the first 48-hours of conceiving the idea.

• The nature and fun of the course
• The journey up the mountain, where characters teach the lessons
• The adventure map you get when signing up
• The online community
• The gamification elements of earning backpack supplies and Bajillion (our mountain currency)
• The storyline that takes place from Basecamp to Launch Summit.
• Having our autoresponders keep people in the story
• and so much more…

Suddenly, instead of building another boring eCourse and online business, we were creating an entire world!

With only ten days to go until Andy was flying back to Hawaii and a deep need for us to generate some cash to bring this idea to life, we got to work.

We wrote, scripted and storyboarded the first 3-checkpoints (16 lessons). Truth be-told, we didn’t even know how to do green screen when we began building the journey. We just knew it was possible!

We also built our online community space, sales page and membership area.

And we launched a 2-month pre-sales experience where people could go through the first 3-checkpoints for free, with the opportunity to buy our beta launch for $300.

We ended up making about $30,000 in pre-sales, which funded us to build the mountain.

It took us 9 months to build the mountain.

If we would have known how much work it would have taken to build the Great eCourse Adventure, we likely would have turned back and sought out an easier path.

But that’s not what pioneers do.

We started our group of beta testers in January 2016 and in those next 5-months, Andy came back to Canada three more times for some more 3-week binge work sessions.

In those stints, we would write, film, improve the community, grow the vision, work on branding, marketing and all sorts of other stuff. We would basically work around the clock.

At that same time, my wife was pregnant (and ill), I was training at sunrise everyday for pro golf, AND we just got a puppy named Bonkers. Things were super full on every single day!

The way we found balance from burning out, was by going on these huge hikes with a journal and writing down all of our ideas on paper before we sat in front of the computer. This was so helpful for our creative process.

Nature and movement are winning combinations.

This has been a lifestyle shift that has stuck for us and something we encourage our students to apply to their work flow as well.

Whoops, we forgot our “free opt-in!”

When we finally uploaded the final lesson to the platform and all of the version 1 tasks were complete, we realized we were missing one important thing.

We didn’t have a free thing to bring people into the world we built for them.

So back to work we went, brainstorming what we could create as a prequal to arriving at the mountain.

We experimented with green screen webinars and repurposing lessons from the course, but none of it brought people into the story and showed the quality of experience they were enrolling themselves in…

Finally, we had the idea come to us.

We were going to build the eCourse Frontier Starship and fly people on a Star Wars themed adventure to the new world of online learning.

Along the way, we would teach them our philosophies on creating highly engaging, immersive, transformational eLearning experiences.

After three months of writing, filming and editing, we launched our Masterclass. 

Originally, we shared the masterclass live via a webinar and had a 90% retention rate.

We knew we created something super special!

Then we reinvented the eBook.

In January 2017, we hired Tad Hargrave for a daylong coaching session.

In this session we refined our unique point of view for the sake of communicating on our website, in our marketing materials and with all of the content we create.

Inspired by that session, we wrote an eBook in a week.

After considering publishing the eBook, we asked ourselves, “Would we read an eBook?”

After both of us saying, “Hell no”, we knew it was time to pave another way.

We experimented with interactive eBooks and all sorts of other ideas, but nothing stuck.

Finally, we figured it out.

We would design a choose your own adventure, interactive learning website called, Courses Worth Sharing. 

The purpose of the website was to teach people how to develop online courses that are so good, their students can’t help but tell everyone they know about it.

This website opened up a whole new world of possibilities for the types of courses and learning pathways we could create.

With that, the UCSE 5000 is coming to be.

In this present moment, we are building an experience design platform.

This will allow us all to build unique and engaging learning experiences with much more ease, fun and customization capabilities.

It will be the soul solution that so many creators are searching for, allowing you to house your online community, build your courses, automate your digital Universe, and build wildly imaginative pages, websites and learning experiences.

Here’s an announcement we made about it a couple weeks ago.

More updates will be coming soon!

If you have read this far, then we would like to welcome you to The Age of Experience Design.

Experience designers will be the ones to pave the way in the e-learning industry.

We’re all beginning to wake up to the fact that we must focus on designing the student’ experience with the student fully in mind and heart.

We encourage you to immerse yourself fully into the world and content we have created here at eCourse Adventures, because there is magic being cultivated in this community and you will want to be a part of it if you’re interested in experience design.

This is not about six figure incomes. This is not about “building your list.”

This is about creating immensely valuable experiences that educate, inspire and entertain.

If there is anything I’ve learned on my entrepreneurial path, it is that we are always where we should be, no matter how much we want something else.

We must be like a sponge and soak in all the goodness, the gifts, the lessons and the wisdom that’s available here and now.

There is no CEO in shining armour who can save you. There is no marketing maven who is coming to your rescue.

You must pull forth from the depths of your being, the work that you are meant to do.

This will require courage, growth and becoming the YOU you’re truly meant to be.

Are you here? Are you with us? Do you feel me?

Share your thoughts below. We’d love to meet you.