Ahhhh, gotchya! haha. Our answer to that problem is by building it in a deeply collaborative approach with a smaller number of people and growing it slowly and steadily in the direction that best suits the collective. It will be crystal clear what/who it is for and not for. Challenge accepted! 🙂

😀 I didn’t mean the companies have pitch forks… your customers will be the ones with the pitch forks. People go nuts when software doesn’t work like they expect. And I don’t blame them. Making software work for you, and then making it work for a wide variety of other people is veeeeery different. I spent 10 years doing UX design, so I’ve seen the mob in person. I was good at what I did, so it wasn’t even that bad. But I know what it required in time and money to make even something simple really great. So you are in for a challenge 🙂

I wish you the best of luck. Looking very much forward to see how it turns out.

Hey Jesper – thanks for the heads-up. We are absolutely, positively sure that this is the direction we want to go. There are a huge number of apps and tools we use to make up the GEA platform, and truth be told, we only end up actually putting 5-10% of each one to use. That’s a lot of redundancy and inefficiency. So we are going to build our own platform that does exactly what it needs to do for us, and absolutely nothing more.

We’re not just going to build a clone of Mailchimp, Teachable, Thinkific, etc etc.

That’s like creating a starting a soda company and going up against Coke and Pepsi. We’re just solving our own problem in our own way, and it will be nothing like anything that currently exists.

So we’ll let Coke and Pepsi battle it out, while we build our craft rootbeer company and slip by beneath the radar 😉

There is no competition here, and we have zero intention of being any bit of a threat to these pitchfork-wielding companies you speak of. (Though if they really are pitchfork-wielding, with mobs and torches, then that’s even more reason for us to no longer do business with them)

We’re just a couple dudes making out-of-the-box products for people like us 🙂

The show must go on!

Thanks for your concern Jesper. With the eCourse Adventure, we are growing a culture and community of people who understand the importance of the long-game. We are building this software for both ourselves and our community, not for the entire online marketing industry. The types of experiences we are, want to and are excited to see our students design are incredibly complicated. We want to make that creative journey much much easier and more fun for everyone.

The UCSE 5000 is going to be for people who understand our philosophies, values and creative principles. The typical online marketers will probably throw up in their mouths when they read about our commitment to experience design over profits and engagement rates over conversion rates. Those folks with the pitch forks won’t be allowed into our inner circle. Our version 1 is going to be open only to 150 people and after that we will only open it up to the number of people we can handle. Any pain in the ass, ungrateful customers will kindly be asked to go elsewhere with their business and we will happily give them a refund.

We are not trying to win over the whole industry. We realize that to go big, we must start small. Our goal is to serve our inner circle in the greatest ways we can. We know that without this Experience Design platform, we will not be able to do that.

Thus, we must build.