From a Pile of Books to a Sold-Out DNA Course with Diahan Southard

Diahan Southard's path to course creation started with a piece of advice from her high school English teacher: find a professor doing something interesting and get involved. At Brigham Young University, she knocked on a door and landed in a lab doing archaeo-genetics — extracting DNA from an ancient Egyptian cemetery. That project turned into the first genetic genealogy database, which eventually became the foundation of Ancestry DNA. She spent two decades in the field, chose to stay home with her kids rather than work full time for Ancestry, and cobbled together a consulting practice under the name Your DNA Guide. By 2020, she was traveling two to three weekends a month to genealogy society conferences, selling books, and making a good living on the lecture circuit. Then the pandemic cancelled every speaking engagement. She was sitting on a pile of self-published books with no way to sell them.

With her speaking income gone, Southard turned to YouTube, found Danny Iny's content, and enrolled in the Course Builders Workshop through Mirasee. The single biggest lesson she internalized was simplicity. She had originally wanted to mirror the branching, choose-your-own-adventure structure of her book, which would have required complex LMS branching logic she could not afford as a solo operator. Instead, she built a straightforward six-week course — five weeks of instruction plus a catch-up week — with prerecorded videos broken into 10-to-12-minute segments. She launched her pilot to her 10,000-person email list at $497 and sold all 25 spots in four hours. She ran the pilot twice, tweaked the material, then launched the full DNA Skills Workshop at $997, nearly filling 50 seats each time.

The active ingredient in Southard's course is the interactive workbook. During each video, she tells students to pause and complete a specific exercise — either going to their own DNA results or filling out a page in the workbook. The workbook pages mirror the slides exactly, down to matching images and page numbers. She learned in her first pilot that even minor visual discrepancies between slides and workbook confused learners. The homework sections use fabricated DNA scenarios with known answers so students can verify their work — something impossible with their own real family data, where the answer is unknown. "You don't know what you've learned until you try to put it into practice," Southard says. "This builds confidence. And this is number one what's lacking — people just don't feel like they can." Her tagline captures it: you can do the DNA.

Southard uses Ruzuku's discussion board as the connective tissue of the course. She monitors it and typically responds within a couple of hours. But the moment she prizes most is when students answer each other's questions before she can get to them — extending the conversation beyond the course scope into genealogy research tips and Canadian records. In the debrief, Danny and Abe highlight two broader takeaways. First, the pilot process let Southard discover that an entire section of content was unnecessary — "in the middle of the class, I gave them a break and called my colleague and said, what am I doing? They're all so lost." She cut that section and later repurposed it as the foundation for a second, more advanced course. Second, the format of interaction matters: just as a music course needs video submissions and a DNA course needs a workbook with answer keys, every course creator needs to crack the code for what practice format actually fits their subject.