Teachable Review [Pros + Cons List] Is it right for you?

Over the past three years I’ve created and launched over 10 courses. I’ve made over $500,000 just through my own product sales alone. And I did this all while being a stay at home mom to three kids under five years old, without full time help or a team.

How did I do this?

By investing in the right tools. And one of the main tools that has helped me grow my blog into a business is Teachable.

What is Teach:able?

Teachable is an online course platform. It hosts video files, creates sales pages, processes payments and pays affiliates. It’s insanely easy to use. 

TEACHABLE ALLOWS YOU TO GO FROM COURSE IDEA TO LAUNCH QUICKLY. THIS ENABLES YOU TO FOCUS ON CREATING AMAZING COURSES, INSTEAD OF WORRYING ABOUT THE TECH.

“Creating courses is the single most effective way of monetizing your audience today.” – Ankur CEO of Teachable

*This post contains affiliate links. Please see my disclosure for more information.

HOW MANY PEOPLE USE TEACHABLE?

Teachable started in 2014 and has over 15 million students learning on it’s platform! Over the past five years, 62,000+ creators have used Teachable to launch their courses that total over $259 million in sales.

HOW MUCH CAN YOU MAKE BY USING TEACHABLE?

Teachable has over 5,000 course creators who made $1,000+ in 2018. In that same year, 17 of their top creators made over a million dollars selling online courses. If you’re wondering where I am in the chart below, I’m one of the 308 creators who made over $100,000 in 2018 – as a stay at home mom!

WHO SHOULD USE TEACHABLE TO CREATE COURSES?

If you’re not tech savvy but you want a few powerful features to turn your blog into an online business, Teachable is for you.

If you’re busy growing your audience and don’t have time to spend tinkering with tech, Teachable is definitely for you.

YOU CAN CREATE A COURSE IN A DAY.

If you have all of your content created, you can upload your text, video and images to Teachable, create your sales page and setup a simple funnel all in one afternoon.

TEACHABLE IS SIMPLE YET POWERFUL.

But before we dive deeper into why I use Teachable, I’d be happy to cover other methods at a high level so you can be sure to choose the best solution for you.

HOW CAN YOU CREATE ONLINE COURSES?

There are many tools online that can help you create online courses. Depending on what type of business you run and how tech savvy you are, there are options. This is both a blessing and a curse, because sometimes having too many options could paralyze you.

I’ll outline all the major methods to creating online courses so you can be confident in choosing the right method for your business.

ALL IN ONE PLATFORMS

1. For the not so tech savvy entrepreneur who wants to create beautiful looking courses quickly.
   1. Teachable
   2. Thinkific
   3. Podia

MEMBERSHIP SITE

1. Super simple to use with limited functionality. Mainly focused on selling and funnels.
   1. Clickfunnels
   2. Kartra

ON YOUR OWN WEBSITE

1. Best for tech savvy entrepreneurs who want more functionality and control of their course.
   1. Lifter LMS
   2. Thrive Apprentice
   3. LearnDash
   4. Members only forum
   5. Free video hosting

You can create your course all on your own website or blog, you can host it on a private forum, you could use membership sites/funnel software, or you can use an all in one platform.

Since my experience is mostly using an all in one platform, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of Teachable. If you fall into another category, go here to learn how to use membership sites or how to create courses on your own site.

HOW MUCH DOES TEACHABLE COST? – PRICING PLANS

For the basic level, Teachable costs $29 per month. For the professional level, Teachable costs $79 per month. And for businesses, Teachable is $399 per month (think companies like Target teaching all of their employees through online courses).

Is it worth it to pay for an all in one platform to host and sell your courses? If you were to recreate this on your own blog, it may cost a little less, but you’ll have the burden of understanding all the tech behind hosting and selling through your blog.

For the not so techy, choosing an all in one platform is a Godsend!

Wondering if you should switch from basic to the professional plan?

If you’re making more than $1,000 per month, switch to the professional plan. 

Here’s the math:

• Basic plan = $29/month + 5% fee of $1,000 = $29 + $50 = $79
• Professional plan = $79/month + no fee = $79

PROS OF TEACHABLE

Teachable takes care of all the tech, so I can focus on helping my students and providing amazing value!

TEACHABLE IS ONLINE COURSE CREATION MADE SIMPLE

Once you have your content created, uploading it into Teachable is a breeze. In a few hours you could have your course created and launched!

Of course, there is more to launching than just sending readers to your sales page. But technically you can make your first sale the same day you sign up for Teachable.

TEACHABLE HOSTS INSANELY VALUABLE SUMMITS EACH YEAR

You can attend Teachable’s summits each year for free, and they are jam packed with value!

Just look at this beautiful lineup of speakers for the Women Who Create summit. See a familiar face? 😉

BUNDLE COURSES AND PRODUCTS WITHIN TEACHABLE

If you have more than one course on Teachable, it’s super simple to bundle them together and offer the bundle at a discounted price.

Now instead of having two products, you have three, and you didn’t even have to create something brand new.

If you have multiple products, you can bundle them all together into one VIP bundle and offer that at a special price to your readers. This allows you to offer smaller bite size courses to your readers and also have a “high-ticket” item.

SELL EBOOKS, SERVICES, WORKSHOPS OR CONFERENCES USING TEACHABLE

Teachable is pretty flexible and allows you to sell not just courses through it’s platform, but ebooks, workshops, services or even conference tickets too!

Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome.com is selling tickets to his first ever conference using Teachable! How crazy is that?

I’ve used Teachable to sell 1:1 coaching, virtual workshops and ebooks.

For these different products, I follow the same process as if I were to create a course. But instead of 10+ modules, I only have one module that allows the student to download the book or setup time on my calendar for private coaching.

TEACHABLE CAN AUTOMATICALLY PAY YOUR AFFILIATES

This is huge! If you plan on growing a large group of affiliates to help launch and promote your course, Teachable can automatically pay them for you.

Instead of calculating affiliates commissions every month and sending out individual payments, let Teachable run this side of your business for you.

As a busy entrepreneur,

you can not do everything.

Just imagine paying for a virtual assistant or team member to do this for you, it would cost more than having Teachable do it.

TEACHABLE ALLOWS SIMPLE FUNNELS

This is huge! Very few other all in one platforms allow this simple, yet insanely powerful feature. With one click, you can covert the thank you page into a one click upsell page.

This feature alone has increased my income dramatically. Depending on what the upsell offer is, I’ve had conversions range from 20%-80% take rate. That’s huge!

CONS OF TEACHABLE

There are many reasons why I use and love Teachable. There are also a few things I really don’t like about Teachable that would make my life so much easier. If you end up using Teachable, I want you to know the cons of the platform too.

CACHING ISSUES

To prevent slow loading times, websites cache their pages. That means there may be an older version of a page stored in your browser cache.

There has been times when a new student purchases one of my courses but when they complete the order, they don’t see the course they just paid for.

It’s because their browser cache is still displaying the older version of the page. Once they clear their cache, or login and logout, they’ll see the course they just purchased.

STORED PAYMENT ISSUES

To make the checkout process as seamless as possible, Teachable has the ability to store your payment details for future purchases.

I’ve had returning student try to purchase a second or third course but get stuck on the check out page.

Because they were using stored payment information, the system didn’t recognize the completed fields.

Teachable has since fixed the issue. They worked tirelessly 1:1 with me and my students to find the solution and they corrected any potential missed payments.

DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE

I get that all systems online have maintenance and updates to do. I myself sometimes update my website and in the process may break a few things. Amazon, the biggest online retailer, completely broke on Prime Day, their largest sale of the year.

So of course, these things happen. But it is annoying when the platform that supports your family’s livelihood goes down for maintenance.

Every few months Teachable goes down for maintenance for a few hours. Yes, these times happen in the middle of the night, but I have students all around the world. And 4:00 AM in the States is in the middle of the day in Europe. So I could be missing purchases.

CREATING SALES PAGES AND UPSELLS

Teachable has a fantastic feature that allows you to create one click upsells. The only problem is, they are tedious to create.

I’m a Divi girl and love how easy it is to create beautiful pages on my blog.

Creating sales pages and upsell pages

on Teachable is a bit like pulling teeth.

The input box is small and there is no ability to copy and paste a template.

It takes me about 20x longer to create a page on Teachable than it would be to create that same page on my blog.

It’s not a make or break for me, but gosh, it would be so wonderful if creating pages on Teachable was as easy as creating them on my blog.

Pro Tip: If you want to create super amazing funnels and use Teachable at the same time, ThriveCart integrates really nicely with the platform! It allows you to do upsells and downsells and bumps offers – oh my!

Checkout these videos for more help.

And if you want to build advanced funnels, this is the video to watch.

IS TEACHABLE FAULTY?

Teachable faces the same issues of any large online service provider. They struggle with caching, downtime and imperfect user experience.

The humor in all of this is that the day after I ranted in a small Facebook group that Teachable is down, my friend told me her courses on Thinkific were down too.

Just remember, there is no perfect solution online to course creation. Each platform has its pros and cons. And there will be times that the platform goes down and you feel like pulling your hair out. The successful entrepreneurs keep going despite the hiccups.

Successful bloggers know that it’s the value of their content, not the specific tool they use, that brings them success.

Ankur, the CEO of Teachable, addresses customer issues about Teachable here to show his commitment to creators’ success.

TEACHABLE HELP – TECH QUESTIONS

Below are a few common technical questions regarding Teachable.

HOW TO DOWNLOAD TEACHABLE VIDEOS

If you’d like to know how to download teachable videos, you can use the little orange box in the edit window. 

I keep a copy of all my courses on my own computer (text, PDFs, and videos).

WHY IS TEACHABLE GREAT FOR BUSY BLOGGERS?

I know paying for an all in one solution like Teachable is an investment into my business. As a busy mom to three gorgeous little kids, it would be impossible for me to run my business DIYing everything.

Teachable allows me to create and launch online courses quickly by using their platform and team for support. If I ever have an issue, or if one of my students have a tech issue, I send an email to support@teachable.com and they’re on it!

I see Teachable support as an extension of my business. I can focus on helping my student transform their lives through my courses, and Teachable handles the tech. It’s a win-win-win solution!

If you’re ready to create online courses to help your audience, sign up for Teachable here.