Teachery User Spotlight is our way of sharing the stories behind course creators using Teachery.

I’m a photographer and a lifelong creative entrepreneur. As a photographer, I specialized for several years doing humanitarian assignment work: not a niche known for its deep pockets. That need to diversify my income, and the hunger I had to teach others, lead me to blogging very early on, which lead me to writing books and developing a wonderful, loyal audience around the world. Eight years ago I accidentally founded a publishing company for photographers called Craft & Vision. We started with one eBook nervously sold on my blog, which led to 2, then 4, and eventually to over 100 digital titles by 20 different authors at its peak. As you can imagine, it was a lot of work.

A couple of years ago the market started to change at about the same time as I started to run out of steam. I wanted to create and market fewer resources, to go deeper with my audience. That’s when the idea of a course started rattling around in my brain. I was reluctant at first, I had no idea what a course would look like, specifically how I’d go about figuring out the technology involved. My wife persisted, having taken several copy-writing courses, and eventually, I got to the point where I wrapped my mind around it, and started to think the idea had been mine all along.

A year ago we decided to go all-in on a course and start moving in that direction. I started drafting outlines while my team engaged a developer to build a course structure on the backend of my Shopify site. Almost from the beginning, it was a nightmare of broken features and lousy design and as I built my course content and it got closer and closer to the launch date I felt more and more like what we were doing was making a series of compromises just to get the thing done. I finally snapped when it seemed like we were going backward with the developer. Each new “fix” seemed to bring about three new breaks.

Frustrated, my manager and I took a day to research some existing options, settled on Teachery because of the simplicity, and fired our developer, licking our wounds. It was the best snap decision I could have made. 

What took a couple of painful months to get to with our developer took two days with Teachery, and the course was far more functional and looked much better. Our first course launched to more than 1400 students and we launch the second in February.

Just this morning I was tweaking things and having an issue and Jason was online and there for me in minutes. It’s not often I get this kind of friendly, helpful service. I’ve been trained to expect developers to speak to me in greek and offer half-hearted solutions to things but every experience with the Teachery team has impressed me.

Being an entrepreneur is an adventure that I love. I love to teach. I love to make people’s lives richer. I love to build new things. But I’ve always leaned to the simpler tools. I’m a teacher and a photographer and a businessman, and I do much of my business from the four corners of this amazing planet. I want tools I can rely on to do what I do from anywhere and to do it well. Don’t get me wrong, I love the challenge. I adore the challenge. But I want to get my challenge from creating new opportunities for my audience to learn, not from my tools. I tell my students the best camera is the one that does what you need it to and gets out of the way as fast as possible. Teachery has done that for me. Thanks, guys!