solobuild
Most first courses fail before a single lesson is recorded. The creator spends two weekends comparing Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi, signs up for a monthly plan, builds a polished curriculum, and then launches to an audience that was never asked whether it would pay. If you are a solo founder with a skill people keep asking you about, there is a cheaper and more honest path. You can sell the course first, deliver it with tools you already have, and only move to a dedicated platform once real students have told you what they need. This guide walks through that path step by step, with current pricing, so you can launch a paid course for close to nothing and learn whether the idea deserves more of your time.
Why skipping the course platform makes sense at the start
Dedicated course platforms solve real problems. They handle student logins, progress tracking, drip schedules, certificates, and payment plans. The trouble is that none of those features matter until you have students, and most first courses never get enough of them to justify a monthly bill. Paying for infrastructure before you have demand is how solo builders end up with a beautiful course that nobody bought and a subscription they forget to cancel.
The deeper reason to wait is that your first version of the course will be wrong in ways you cannot predict. Students will get stuck on a lesson you thought was obvious, and they will skip one you spent days on. When your course lives in a simple shared folder or a set of documents, fixing those problems takes minutes. When it lives inside a platform with a structured curriculum builder, you are more likely to leave it alone because editing feels like work.
There is also a trust angle that gets overlooked. A small first cohort that you teach closely, with direct email access to you, often feels more valuable to buyers than a slick self-paced product from someone they barely know. People who build in public on Indie Hackers regularly describe their first course as a beta that they sold at a discount, delivered live, and then turned into a self-paced product later. That order of operations keeps your risk low and gives you testimonials before you need them.
Step one: presell before you build anything
The most important decision in this whole process is to collect money before you create lessons. Asking your audience whether they would be interested in a course is not validation, because saying yes costs nothing. A pre-order is different. When someone enters a card number for a course that does not exist yet, they are telling you the problem is worth solving and that they trust you to solve it.
A presale has a simple structure. You write a short page that describes the outcome of the course in concrete terms, for example "set up and send your first cold email campaign in two weeks" rather than "master cold email." You list what students will get, when the first session or module will be ready, and a founding price that is noticeably lower than what you plan to charge later. Common advice from course creators is to offer somewhere around 40 to 60 percent off the future price to early buyers, since they are taking a risk on an unfinished product.
You should also set a minimum number of buyers before you commit. A reasonable threshold for a first course is somewhere between 10 and 20 paying students, though the right number depends on your price and how much work the course will take. If you miss the threshold by your deadline, you refund everyone and thank them. That outcome feels bad for a day, but it saves you weeks of building something the market did not want, and the people who did buy will usually respect the honesty.
Where you share the presale matters more than how polished it looks. Your email list, a community you are already active in, and people who have asked you for help in the past are far better sources than cold social posts. If you have no audience at all, the presale will tell you that quickly too, which is useful information in itself.
Step two: build a sales page and take payments with no monthly fees
For the sales page, a one-page site is enough. Carrd is a good fit here because it is fast to build with and very cheap. The free plan works for testing, but you will likely want Pro Standard at $19 per year, which adds a custom domain, forms, and the ability to embed payment buttons. If you want Stripe checkout built directly into a Carrd form, that requires Pro Plus at $49 per year. All Carrd paid plans bill yearly, so this is a one-time cost for the whole launch rather than a monthly drain.
For payments, Stripe Payment Links are the simplest option that still looks professional. You create a product in your Stripe dashboard, set the price, and Stripe gives you a checkout URL you can paste anywhere, including a button on your Carrd page, an email, or a direct message. Stripe does not charge a monthly fee for this. You pay the standard processing fee, which in the United States is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per card transaction, and Carrd does not add anything on top of that. On a $149 course, that works out to about $4.62 per sale.
The piece that makes this feel like a real product is what happens after payment. In the Payment Link settings, you can choose to redirect buyers to a page of your choice once checkout succeeds. Point that redirect to a welcome page that explains what happens next, links to the course materials, and tells students how to reach you. You can also turn on Stripe's automatic email receipts so every buyer has a record of the purchase without you doing anything.
It is worth being clear about the tradeoff. A redirect page is not a secure login. Anyone who has the link can share it. For a first course priced under a few hundred dollars and sold to people who know you, that risk is small, and most early buyers are not interested in pirating the work of someone they are paying to learn from. If you are selling something expensive or to a large anonymous audience, that is a sign you need a real platform sooner.
Step three: deliver the course with tools you already use
With money collected, you can finally build, and the goal is to build only what your students need next. For most first courses, the delivery layer is one of three setups, and each one is cheap or free.
The first option is a shared Notion workspace or a single Notion page with nested sub-pages for each module. You can embed videos from YouTube (set to unlisted) or Loom, add written notes, include templates, and update everything instantly. Notion's free plan is enough for this, and students do not need their own account to view a published page. The downside is that there is no progress tracking, so you will need to check in with students directly.
The second option is a Google Drive folder with lessons as unlisted videos and supporting documents. This is the most familiar setup for students who are not especially technical, and it takes almost no time to organize. The downside is presentation, since a folder full of files does not feel like a course, so pair it with a welcome document that tells students the order to go through things.
The third option, and often the best one for a first run, is a live cohort. You teach the material over a series of video calls, record each session, and share the recordings afterward. This approach has real advantages beyond cost. You hear students' questions in real time, you find out which parts confuse them, and the finished recordings become the raw material for a self-paced version later. Cohorts also create accountability, which tends to improve completion rates compared to a self-paced course that people buy and never open.
Whatever you choose, keep one channel for communication. An email thread, a small Discord server, or a simple group chat works fine. Students care far more about getting a real answer from you within a day than about which tool the answer arrives in.
Step four: know when to move to an all-in-one platform
The DIY stack has limits, and you will feel them as the course grows. Manual onboarding gets tedious after a few dozen students. Shared links start to circulate. You want to send a sequence of emails to buyers, offer a payment plan, or add an upsell for a second course, and each of those needs another tool stitched to the others. At that point, the time you spend maintaining the setup costs more than a subscription would.
This is where an all-in-one platform like Systeme.io becomes worth a look. It combines sales pages, checkout, email marketing, and course hosting with student logins in one account. Its free plan is unusually generous for a course creator testing an idea. It includes one course, up to 2,000 contacts, three sales funnels, unlimited email sends, and no transaction fees from Systeme.io itself, though your payment processor still charges its normal rate. Reviews note that the free plan caps student accounts at 500, which is more than enough for a first course.
If you outgrow the free plan, the Startup plan costs $17 per month and raises the limits to five courses, 5,000 contacts, and more funnels and automation rules. The Webinar and Unlimited plans cost $47 and $97 per month respectively. Users who like Systeme.io tend to point to the price and the fact that everything lives in one place. The common criticism is that its page builder and course player look more basic than platforms like Kajabi, so if design polish matters a lot to your audience, factor that in.
A reasonable rule of thumb is to stay on the DIY stack until you have run the course at least once and sold it to a second group. By then you know your price works, you know how the curriculum should be structured, and moving everything into a proper platform becomes a one-afternoon migration rather than a guess.
Comparing the tools in this setup
The tools above do different jobs, so this table is less about picking a winner and more about seeing what each one costs and where it fits.
| Tool | Best For | Free Tier | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carrd | One-page sales and presale pages | Yes, with Carrd branding and no custom domain | $19 per year (Pro Standard) |
| Stripe Payment Links | Taking card payments without a checkout platform | No monthly fee | 2.9% + 30¢ per US card transaction |
| Notion | Hosting written lessons and embedded videos | Yes, enough for a small course | Free for this use |
| Google Drive | Sharing video files and worksheets | Yes, 15 GB of storage | Free for this use |
| Systeme.io | Moving to hosted courses with logins, email, and funnels | Yes, 1 course and 2,000 contacts | $17 per month (Startup) |
Frequently asked questions
Can I sell an online course without a website?
Yes. A Stripe Payment Link works on its own, and you can share it in an email, a social post, or a direct message. After payment, Stripe can redirect buyers to a Notion page or welcome document with the course materials. A simple sales page on Carrd helps with trust and gives you one place to explain the course, but it is optional for a first presale to people who already know you.
How much does it cost to launch a course without a course platform?
For a first launch, the fixed cost can be as low as $19 per year for a Carrd Pro Standard plan, plus Stripe's processing fees on each sale. Notion, Google Drive, YouTube, and Zoom all have free plans that cover a small course. If you skip the custom domain and sales page entirely, you can launch with no fixed cost at all and pay only per transaction.
How do I stop people from sharing my course link?
With a DIY setup, you cannot fully prevent it, since unlisted links and shared pages can be forwarded. You can reduce the risk by keeping your price reasonable, selling mainly to your own audience, adding real value through live sessions or direct support that a shared link cannot replace, and changing the link between cohorts. If sharing becomes a real problem, that is a clear sign to move to a platform with individual student logins.
How many people should buy before I build the course?
A common threshold for a first course is 10 to 20 paying buyers. That number is large enough to show real demand and small enough to reach through your existing network. Set the number and a deadline before you launch the presale, and commit to refunding everyone if you do not reach it.
The simplest path to a first paid course
The cheapest way to find out whether your course idea is worth building is to ask people to pay for it before it exists. A Carrd page and a Stripe Payment Link can handle that for less than the cost of a single month on most course platforms. If enough people buy, you deliver the first version through Notion, a Drive folder, or a live cohort, and you use what you learn from those students to shape the real product.
Once the course has sold more than once and the manual work starts to add up, an all-in-one tool like Systeme.io is a sensible next step, and its free plan means you can make that move without a new monthly bill. The order matters more than the tools. Sell first, teach closely, and upgrade your setup only when your students give you a reason to.