When we ask course creators to share their thinking, they almost always start talking about content: "I'm going to present about X, Y, Z, and then we'll have this cool worksheet, and then..." That instinct is natural — but it leads to courses that are unfocused, overlong, and hard to sell. The fix is simple: design your course backwards.
Why Content-First Design Fails
When you start by listing everything you know about a topic, two things happen:
- Your scope explodes. You envision a brilliantly comprehensive program that will solve every problem, answer every question, and showcase every bit of your expertise. This sounds impressive until you realize it will take six months to create and overwhelm students who just wanted to learn one specific thing.
- Your audience blurs. Without clarity about who specifically you're serving and what specific result they'll achieve, your course tries to help everyone — and ends up helping no one deeply.
These are the two most common failure modes we see in course design: too-big scope and too-vague audience. Both stem from the same root — starting with content instead of starting with the transformation.
The Case for Focus
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham — whose incubator launched Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe — offers advice that applies directly to course creation:
"It's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. When you focus on making a few people really happy, it's harder to lie to yourself."
The same principle holds for courses. A focused program is easier to design, easier to create, easier to market and sell, and easier to teach. A sprawling program is harder on every dimension — including for your students, who have to wade through material that doesn't serve their specific goal.
How to Design Backwards: The Sales Page Exercise
Here's the counterintuitive move: before you outline a single lesson, write your sales page. Not a polished marketing page — just honest answers to six questions that will clarify everything about your course.
- Who are you serving? Who are you NOT serving?
Be specific. "Coaches" is too broad. "Health coaches in their first two years of practice who want to add online group programs" is a course you can actually design. Defining who you're not serving is just as important — it gives you permission to leave things out.
- What is the problem?
Write down a specific problem you help people overcome. Explain it in as much detail and depth as you can. The more vividly you can describe the pain, the more clearly you understand your students. For research methods, see 10 Ways to Research What Your Students Actually Want.
- What is possible?
Write down what's possible if your student's problem is solved. Paint a vivid picture of the "after" state. This is the transformation your course delivers — and the core of your marketing message.
- What are the top 3 emotional or practical benefits?
Not features ("6 video modules") — benefits. How will your students feel? What will they be able to do? What changes in their day-to-day life?
- What are 3 specific topics you will cover to deliver these benefits?
Just three. This is where focus gets real. You probably have ten topics you could teach. Pick the three that most directly produce the transformation. The rest can become a future course, bonus material, or — most likely — content your students don't actually need.
- Imagine and write a testimonial from a future student.
This is the most revealing exercise. Write what you'd want a student to say after completing your course. What result did they get? What changed? If you can't write a convincing testimonial, your transformation isn't specific enough yet.
When you finish these six answers, you'll have something more valuable than a course outline — you'll have clarity about why your course exists and who it's for. The outline follows naturally from there. For a more detailed approach to writing the actual sales page, see Write a Course Sales Page That Converts.
From Transformation to Milestones to Lessons
With your transformation defined, work backwards through three levels:
- Milestones — What are the 3–5 key checkpoints students need to reach on the way to the transformation? Each milestone becomes a module. For example, if the transformation is "launch your first online course," the milestones might be: define your audience, design your curriculum, create your content, set up your platform, and run your pilot.
- Steps — For each milestone, what specific skills, knowledge, or mindset shifts are needed? Each step becomes a lesson. Keep it to 2–4 lessons per module — if you need more, your milestone may be too broad.
- Activities — For each lesson, what will students do to practice and internalize the material? Exercises, discussions, and real-world applications are what turn information into capability.
The course outline tool can help you structure this — plug in your transformation and milestones and it generates a starting framework.
The "Minimum Path" Test
After you've sketched your outline, apply one final filter: for each lesson, ask "Could my student achieve the transformation without this?" If the answer is yes, cut it. You can always add depth in a future iteration, but you can't un-overwhelm a student who's buried in content they didn't need.
This is especially important for experts, who tend to include "essential background" that feels necessary from their perspective but is an unnecessary detour for students. For more on this trap, see 5 Common Mistakes When Building an Online Course.
Why This Approach Works for Marketing Too
Here's the bonus: when you design backwards, your marketing practically writes itself. Your sales page describes the transformation (question 3), speaks to a specific person (question 1), addresses their pain (question 2), and promises clear benefits (question 4). You're not trying to sell "12 modules of content" — you're selling a specific result for a specific person.
Courses designed this way are also easier to price with confidence, because you can point to the concrete value of the transformation rather than justifying hours of content. See the Complete Guide to Course Pricing for more on value-based pricing.
Your Next Step
Set a timer for 20 minutes and answer the six sales page questions above for your course idea. Don't overthink it — first-draft answers are fine. The goal is clarity, not polish. If you get stuck on any question, that's a signal you need more audience research before you start building.
Once you have your answers, you're ready to outline your course with real focus — not from a list of everything you know, but from a clear vision of where your students need to go.