I have been looking for a platform that would enable me to sell and host my courses for a long time!

In fact I already started looking in 2013, and when I couldn't find what I needed I decided to create and build my own platform. That became Sketchdrive, an independent platform that offered interactive sketching courses for online learners. It has served me well for almost 10 years, but I left the company in 2023 and started looking into new options again to meet my evolving needs.

Screenshot of the course offerings on the Sketchdrive platform (2017).

The website we had been using to offer our courses was a Wordpress site so I first started looking into LMS plugins and other tools to cobble everything together, but nothing seemed to tick all the boxes and maintaining a Wordpress can require quite some work (I know from experience!).

I had almost decided to invest in one of the plugins (Sensei) but by chance I noticed a post on Instagram by Devon Rodriguez who just launched a new oil painting course.

Out of curiosity I followed the link he shared and found out he was hosting his course on Podia.

Digging further I discovered that Podia actually had a solution for almost everything I was looking for. And when I added up all costs for my existing bundle of platforms and tools, Podia actually came out cheaper! So it became obvious that a switch to Podia was probably the best move for my site and my courses.

For a couple of weeks I worked night and day to transfer all my content to Podia and to completely style the website to my own taste, which was a lot of work, but super intuitive and fun to do! Looking back I can see it was also a liberating move to break away from the design of my old site and build it from the ground up again.

I decided to take the site live even before my courses were completely done to already start promoting them to my audience. In the meantime I kept building content and optimising the design. I currently offer four different sketch courses and I am already working on the next one. I also offer workshops, I have set up a page to share my keynote talks, I started a blog (this page) and I have a section with tips&tricks.

The Podia platform is serving me well. I really enjoy the fact that It has everything built in: website hosting, course platform, email, sales, chat and even a community platform!

If you are also looking for an all in one solution or just an easy way to build a website or maybe you want to simply host a community, I highly recommend Podia!

If you do, please use my affiliate link to sign up to Podia so I get a small kickback :)

https://www.podia.com/?via=057a15

Thanks!
Martijn