Honest Teachable Review - Why I’m Loyal After 8 Years
You’re ready to diversify your income by adding a digital product or course to your offer lineup? You’ve come to the right place. I’ve been in business 9 years, run a multi-7-figure online education business, and have built 388 digital products, 25 courses, 5 online summits, 3 group coaching programs, and 4 memberships. Nearly all of them in some variation or another have landed on Teachable.
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How I Built My Teachable School & Its Impact on My Business
When I started, there weren’t a lot of course hosting options on the market . Frankly, there were no options. I frankensteined together my first course with “private-listed” Youtube videos and a password-protected page on Squarespace— super secure, I know.
Eventually, I found a standalone paywall software, which at the time was called TinyPass. This upped my ability to appear like I was protecting my page by allowing my users for the first time to create their own logins.
It was so hackable. Anyone with a minimal level of html experience could remove the paywall with one click and bypass paying to access your content. The company merged with Piano Media (unsure if they even still exist at all) in 2015.
I craved a place that would securely store my course AND allow me to build more. I wanted to have a login experience that would allow my users to access all the courses they own from my company in one spot.
Circa 2016, this wasn’t a small ask. My options were slim. I was doing everything I could to avoid building a custom WordPress site and code my own backend system to house my courses.
I knew there had to be a simpler option.
I was first introduced to Teachable when they were in the early stages of Beta. And I’ve grown my company right along with them. I’ve had the opportunity to explore dozens of other course platform softwares and nothing has come close to the experience I’ve had with Teachable.
I don’t make that statement lightly. In the world of online courses, I was early to market and my company grew quickly. I have been one of the top creators on Teachable since the early days. And because of that, many other platforms have reached out trying to poach me and incentivize me to switch!
What do I mean by poaching? I’ve been offered cash and full-time team members at my disposal as incentives to switch platforms, not just once but MANY times over the last 8 years. Often the platform would offer to gift me the cost of the platform, pay me cash compensation, and assign “support staff” to be just a Slack message away at any time.
Every time I was offered some big incentive to switch to a new platform, I took the time to vet the company, check out the tech, and often met with the CEO and/or Head of Development. And not once was I tempted to switch.
Now in full transparency, I have just recently become a Brand Partner for Teachable in 2024. This includes payment for promotion as well as affiliate commission. Please know that while that is true, the opinions expressed in this article are my own. You don’t stay loyal to a company for 8 years by accident.
The trust of my community is far more important than any amount of compensation.
So why have I stayed all these years, through all the iterations and ups and downs? I’m going to go over that and so much more in this article, including:
“Teachable is the easiest, most streamlined online course platform out there.”
More Features vs. More Traffic
As someone who’s built a large business in this industry, definitely top 1%, potentially even top 0.5%— I’m here to tell you that most of the features you’ve hung your hat on as being essential are just distractions from you actually building a business.
You don’t need:
Complicated funnels that take months to build
Fancy email marketing systems that trigger & target based on engagement
Advanced CRM features (Do you even have a sales team? Outside of you?)
The tech simply needs to work so you can focus on serving your clients and customers. Most advanced features I haven’t needed until post $1M in revenue, and even then I could easily wait until $5M+ to explore them.
Not because some of them aren’t effective. But we’re talking about a potential 1% change many times. More traffic will make you way more money than a 1% difference until you’re at scale.
I KNOW you hear people talk about tweaks like this on their podcast, but I need you to put into perspective how large of a company they are running. When 1% increase changes your launch by $100k you do it. When 1% increase changes your launch by $10— get your feet on the streets and focus on getting in front of more people.
Maybe brutal, but true.
Teachable Was Acquired by HotMart
What you might not know is Teachable was acquired by HotMart (a Brazil-based company) in 2020, one of the world’s most successful course providers with a global reach. HotMart is designed for an international user and they acquired Teachable as the standout leader in the US Market.
Do other companies have significant market share? Absolutely. But do I think a world leader like HotMart picked Teachable for a reason? One hundred percent.
The aligned values of both companies —putting creator needs first and giving creators full ownership of their content– only improved the customer experience!
The way this company has blended over the last few years has only improved operations of what were some inevitable hiccups of the fast-paced growth the company experienced during its startup phase.
I’m very excited for what the future holds with this synergy in motion!
The Grass is Not Always Greener
The allure of the new and unexplored can sometimes overshadow the stability and growth we have right where we are. It’s easy to be tempted by the promise of a platform that claims to revolutionize your business overnight. However, the truth often lies in the strength of the foundation you’ve already built.
Transitioning to a new platform might seem like a shortcut to addressing challenges, but it’s essential to recognize the hidden costs. These aren’t just monetary but include the operational downtime, the learning curve for new systems, and the potential disruption to your students' experience. Stability and consistency in your course delivery platform can be the bedrock on which you build your empire.
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Why Teachable Has Been Steady Ground for Me
Instead of being swayed by the shiny new features elsewhere, I’ve found immense value in Teachable’s dedication to improving and refining its core offerings. This focus on excellence over excess ensures that the platform remains reliable, allowing me to concentrate on what I do best: creating and teaching.
Why I Don’t Want More Features
In this industry, there has been a large push for these all-inclusive platforms that do it all. Sales funnels, web hosting, sales pages, checkout, course hosting, email marketing, more, more, more. Here’s the thing, this means they are constantly trying to do more, without improving the basic fundamentals of the product.
This makes for a clunky, buggy experience with lots of downtime.
I need a product that works, all the time, whether I’m babysitting it or not.
Teachable is GREAT at what they do. And if they were to focus on too many things I would fear for what that meant for their core product. I appreciate their intentionality and continued scrutiny to just add more for the sake of adding more.
Dependable
No exaggeration, I’ve reached out to support maybe half a dozen times in 8 years. And primarily it was to ask a super advanced question. I can only remember 1 outage that affected sales in 8 years and it was big enough to shut down Meta for twice as long (which absolutely makes me think Teachable had nothing to do with it). Any other time we’ve chatted it’s because I spoke up about the needs of this community or suggested a new feature. That kind of dependability is hard to find.
Key Features That Keep Me On The Platform
Expand Your Impact - The Student Experience
Intuitive
My background is in Web Design. And I know firsthand how important UX/UI is for overall experience. Having a platform that feels intuitive, like you ALREADY know what to do without a tour or walkthrough was critical to me.
It feels familiar while still being fresh, up-to-date, and classic.
Interactive & Informative
One of the places Teachable shines is how interactive the student experience can truly be. Many other platforms out there have just a text box and a place to upload a video.
With Teachable, you can offer your students things like quizzes to test for understanding and course completion certificates to award their progress.
You can monitor their progress. See where they get stuck, a module they don’t move past, videos they watch repeatedly and so much more.
Chef’s Kiss - The Design is Beautiful
I’m gonna say it. A lot of the other options out there are UGLY. I don’t need to name names for you to know what I mean. I want my online course experience to feel aligned with all the other pieces of my brand. So many other options out there would add a MAJOR disconnect between how I present myself online and how students learn in my courses. With the backend looking beautiful, the experience feels seamless and elevates the work I’m already doing.
Take It On the Go - Mobile Friendly
If you’ve explored Teachable in the past and thought their app fell flat… my friends, me too. But HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEW ONE?! I can’t tell you how excited I am that this app makes it so easy for students to take courses on the go. Whether they catch them on a long drive, during their workout or cooking dinner. You have more options than ever to let them consume the content you put so much work into creating.
Compliance - Ensure Your Students Take Your Lessons In Order
While I don’t think this applies to every industry, in some instances this could be important. Students naturally want to skip ahead. You have options to lock this ability to ensure that they are consuming lessons in the correct order and watching at least 90% of each video before proceeding to future lessons.
Secure, Flexible & Automated Payments
Flexible Payment Types & Auto-Billing
When utilizing teachable:pay you are letting your student pay their way, meaning they automatically have the option to pay via Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Stripe Link, or via a Credit or Debit Card.
You get to choose the payment structure - pay in full (one-time purchase), payment plan (that auto charges on the schedule you set), or subscription (auto bill weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, every 3 or 6 months or annually).
If you’ve ever had to hunt down a client for them to make their next payment, you know how valuable automated payments are!
Buy Now, Pay Later
You also have options to turn on finance options with their Buy Now, Pay Later features that connect to popular services like AfterPay and Klarna (at the time of writing this we have not yet experimented with the finance options available).
BackOffice: Automated Affiliate & Collaborator Payouts
Use BackOffice for automated collaborator payouts and tax forms, plus access to advanced payment options. You will need to activate it to utilize Buy Now, Pay Later & PayPal payment options on teachable:pay.
Tax Handling
Save time with automated calculation, collection, remittance, and filing sales taxes. Teachable is one of the only online learning platforms that collects and remits both EU/UK VAT and U.S. sales tax for creators on their native payment gateways (Teachable Payments and Monthly Payment Gateway).
Marketing Your Offers, Sales Tools & Easy Checkout
Offer Types
Teachable supports a variety of offer types that make it super flexible, with options that include:
Digital Products - Get your digital product ready for sale in seconds. Just fill out a few quick details, upload your file OR link to a page of your choice, hit Save. And you’re ready.
Courses - Their simple drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to upload videos, audio, files, templates, guides and more. You decide what’s included! Easily branded to your colors and preferences, no tech skills necessary.
Coaching - Offer this product alongside a course for a group coaching experience. Or customize content based on your 1:1 client’s needs. Create milestones, schedule meetings, set-up video calls, send messages and files.
Memberships - Whether you want subscription tiers that gate access to different products, or you want a simple all-access approach, you have choices. You can set monthly or annual pricing and add a free trial (if you want). Your members can easily manage their subscriptions right in their account - allowing them to easily upgrade, downgrade or cancel without reaching out to you for customer support.
And even Lead Magnets (making an offer FREE makes this super simple!) - While this isn’t technically a separate offer type, you can make ANY of the above options free for an incredible lead magnet experience. Just ONE of mine has brought in 9,641 leads on its own.
Coupons
Easily run promotions or utilize coupons to track the performance of certain initiatives. You can even add them to your checkout link to auto-populate at checkout.
Example Normal Checkout Link:
https://academy.bossproject.com/purchase?product_id=5257854
Example with Attached Coupon:
https://academy.bossproject.com/purchase?coupon_code=SAVE100&product_id=5257854
Add coupons to a single product or make them available school-wide. Limit uses or add an expiration date. You have so much built-in flexibility with this feature.
Order Bumps - Increase Average Order Value
During checkout, you can easily present additional offers to increase average order value. I’ve had bumps listed at $11–77 that convert far beyond my expectations (some as high as 25% of the time).
One-Click Upsells
Once a prospect becomes a student, allow them to make additional purchases with a single click. Not only can you do this during the checkout process, you can now include upsells embedded into your course program materials.
Abandoned Cart
Utilize Teachable’s built-in abandoned cart features to re-engage prospects who haven’t completed a purchase.
Affiliates & Referrals
Affiliates and/or students can easily refer others to your school or specific offers. Utilize teachable:pay with Backoffice support and Teachable will automatically handle the affiliate payout and tax paperwork.
Sales & Marketing Integrations
Easily integrate with third parties. We typically use integrations in combination with Zapier to connect it to whatever else we are trying to accomplish. From automatically adding new students to our email service provider, to sending Slack notifications when a new student joins our coaching program.
Analytics & Reporting - For Your Sales & Student Performance
Course Reports
See how students are interacting with your courses with stats on lecture and video completion, quiz scores, and course leaderboards.
Sales Reports & Dashboard
Easily track sales performance—total sales, earnings, refunds, chargebacks, affiliate commissions, and payouts. The Dashboard has always been my favorite tab, see daily & monthly revenue, order bumps, abandoned cart revenue recovery, course sales, lesson, course completions & more.
Student Progress Reports
Get valuable data on your students’ lesson completion status, video viewing behavior, and quiz scores. I collaborate often with our Program Manager (internal to our team) to check in on these reports to ensure our students are progressing and getting the help they need to succeed.
Understand Student Behavior with Analytic & Reporting Integrations
Connect to apps and tools like Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, and Hotjar to better understand how your students are interacting with your school.
Teachable Plans & Pricing
Candidly I have to say I know this has been an area of contention for people in the past. As Teachable has evolved, so has their pricing structure. Trust me when I say I am constantly advocating for online educators as a whole, not just for how it will affect me, but how it will affect all of us.
I’m running a business and I understand Teachable is also running its own. I believe after some pushback in 2023, they have really stepped forward to ensure their users’ long-term success while making this an affordable option that scales with you.
When I started on Teachable, I remember doing the math. I wanted to know not just what the plan included, but based on my sales volume, when I believed it would be most cost-effective to switch. I’ve included my suggestions based on sales volume and number of transactions when I believe it makes sense to switch.
Free Plan
Try it out and start earning before you pay. I think this is a great place for anyone to start while they are building out their first or next product or pre-sale. You will be charged $1 + 10% of your sale price (as a transaction fee) + any credit card fees (that would be the same regardless of platform).
Recommended for: From $0–650/month in sales (Up to 15 transactions/month)
Can have up to 1 each - Digital Product, Course & Coaching Offer
If it were me, because of the addition of coupons & order bumps on the Basic plan, I would only stay on the free plan to build my first offer then immediately bump up before I started selling (OR for the best deal grab this 3-Months of Pro for $3).
Basic Plan
Lots of additional features become available on the basic plan, most notably the coupons & order bumps. Using Order Bumps I’ve seen transactions easily increase by an additional 50% or more (and convert more than 20% of the time) without any additional sales promotion.
Example:
Product price: $97
Bump price: $77
Total Sale: $174
Additionally, the transaction fee drops down to 5% of your sale price (as a transaction fee) + any credit card fees (that would be the same regardless of platform).
Recommended for: Up to $1000/month in sales or 15 transactions/month
Can have up to 5 each - Digital Product, Course & Coaching Offer + 1 Membership Tier
I will say I’ve seen complaints about a 5% transaction fee. And I agree that it’s significant. That said, I think more often than not it's from people who do not understand when it’s cost-effective to upgrade plans.
Paying almost 3x the base price (jumping from $39 on basic to $119 on pro) may sound like a lot (still so much cheaper than many competitors). If you are growing quickly, $119 will soon be a steal by removing that transaction fee altogether. Yes, you pay that upfront, but it will be more cost-effective if you pass that recommended threshold I mentioned above.
In a product-based business, you can expect to spend 30-50% of your sales price on the cost of goods sold. 5% is an insane deal and opens you up to a very low overhead way of doing business.
If you want to ramp up, I’d start with this $3 deal on Pro & remove those transaction fees from the get-go!
Pro Plan
For a growing business, moving to a 0% transaction fee is the real game changer (you still pay credit card processing fees - those are unavoidable on any platform). This plan can carry you a super long way with the ability to have:
Up to 50 published products of each type (course, coaching, downloads)
Unlimited Membership tiers
Affiliates & easily track their performance (without additional software)
Upsells
White labeling (Removable Teachable branding)
5 admin accounts
API Access
And more
Recommended for: Up to $1600/month in sales or 55 transactions/month
Can have up to 50 each - Digital Product, Course & Coaching Offer + Unlimited Membership Tiers
At $119/month (billed annually) you are still getting a massive deal compared to competitors. Expect to pay 3x this for competitive features (whether you go with an all-in-one product or are piecing together solutions).
Pro+ & Business Plan
Most businesses will not need to explore Pro+ or Business until they are ready to scale beyond that 50-product threshold. At Pro+ this goes to 200 each - courses, digital products, coaching & bundles. On Business there is unlimited.
If you are currently on another platform and considering migrating, I suggest you reach out to support as there are migration options available for businesses of this scale. Just make sure you mention I sent ya ;)
Teachable Pros & Cons
Pros
Easy to get started! Very beginner friendly
Excellent customer support - they want to see their users be successful
Scales with you - makes sense at $0 from courses & digital products to multi-7-figures
UX/UI feels intuitive, clean and modern
Design is beautiful out of the box and requires minimal updates to make it feel like an extension of your brand
Create engaging, effective lessons with text, video, audio, quizzes, embedded media, upsells, and more
Built-in sales pages for each of your products and courses—no additional web hosting needed
Built-in affiliate tracking & payouts (I’ve cobbled these features together in the past)
Best out of the box analytics I’ve seen to track student progress and success inside your courses
Even if you offer a diverse range of products - this can be THE way you process payments
Simple coupon management to utilize for various promos or tracking
Easy to add order bump & upsell options to increase average order value
Cons
Would love to see more advanced reporting - Example: forecasting based on payment plans and/or MRR
Backoffice isn’t as straightforward as it could be— even as a long-time active user I was unclear when it made sense to start taking advantage of these advanced features
Requires user to know when upgrading makes sense— would love to see more messaging for active users like “Upgrade to save” or examples of # of transactions/size of business to upgrade
Community features are new and still lack some of the stickiness I think is necessary to get users to come back and utilize it regularly
Why I Think Teachable Puts You at a Competitive Advantage
You can read 100 other reviews and likely get 100 different answers as to how to move forward. But here’s the thing. Most of them are written by people who are still in the very early stages of their business and are jumping from one shiny object to the next thinking *this* will be the thing that finally helps them scale.
Point blank, are there other platforms out there with more features? Yes. Do I think they are necessary for you to scale a profitable and sustainable business? Nope.
Teachable is incredibly intentional about the tools they roll out to their users. They are incentivized to see you grow. They want you to be successful.
There are a million things they could do. And time and time again they focus on what is going to provide the most benefit to the most users!
Consumers want a straightforward approach. How do you help, what do you offer to help me with those things, and how do I take the next step? With Teachable you get to make that simple.
It’s easier than ever for your audience to take the next step.
With Teachable you get to focus on what you do best because they take care of the rest.
My time is split between Marketing & Sales (driving traffic to my offers) and Coaching (making sure my clients are successful). I’m not babysitting a system that’s always breaking (never happens) or on calls with support (because the product just works).
Teachable takes care of my students, delivering a simple sales process that converts. A learning environment designed to keep them engaged. And ways for them to take their learning on the go (with the NEW app).
Why I’m a Proud Brand Partner for Teachable in 2024
Choosing Teachable wasn’t just about picking a platform. It was about choosing a partner in growth. From its user-friendly interface to its robust support system, Teachable has proven time and again that its commitment to my success is unwavering.
The platform has evolved, not by chasing the latest trends, but by focusing on what truly matters: creating a dependable and effective environment for both creators and learners.
I started here because the features made sense and getting my offers off the ground was easy. I’ve stayed because the platform aligns with my values and supports my growth.
As a Brand Partner, I’ve had behind-the-scenes access to this team. I’ve seen firsthand their deep desire to see their customers succeed. Consistently, the conversation behind closed doors is focused on how they can help grow YOUR businesses. It blows me away how often YOU are the center of their focus and attention.
Like any long-term relationship, there have been points on this journey where I felt like I needed more from the relationship. And they consistently have listened and focused on continuous improvement. And not in one of those overhyped ways— where it’s “sure, we got this” and then it’s all this false hope and empty promises.
If anything they consistently undersell and OVER deliver. Time and time again.
Teachable has been more than just a platform— it’s been a reliable partner on my journey.
Quick Verdict: Is Teachable the Right Platform for Your Online Course?
I highly recommend Teachable. It is easy to set up, very reasonably priced, and includes great tutorials for getting your first (or next) digital product, course or coaching available for purchase. If you have knowledge you'd like to share with the world, this is where I would start. You can start a Pro Plan by grabbing the the best deal - 3-Months of Pro for $3.
How to Get Started
You can get started with a FREE plan here or try Teachable Pro at the best price I’ve ever seen. Want help developing a no-brainer digital product? We’d love to help - check out Digital Product Jumpstart for the methods we’ve used to do more than $3.11 Million in just entry-point digital offers.
