Course Creator
Community, audience, payments, and a way to record + repurpose content — without becoming a full-stack dev.
Skool for community + course delivery, Beehiiv for the audience funnel, Stripe for one-shot or installment payments, ElevenLabs and Submagic for content production, Loom for record-once-share-many.
A course business is two products in a trench coat: the artifact (the course itself) and the funnel (audience → buyer → renewer). Most course platforms try to be both and fail at the second. The stack below splits them cleanly: Skool runs the artifact, your newsletter runs the funnel, Stripe handles the money.
Skool replaced the old Kajabi/Teachable stack for most operators in the last 18 months. Community is the differentiator (people don't churn out of conversations they care about), and the course delivery is good enough.
Free until you really need monetization. Newsletter does the awareness + nurture work; a sequence on signup pre-sells the cohort. The cohort link goes to a Stripe checkout, not Skool's native checkout — keeps the funnel clean.
Native installment plans, one-time payments, and recurring subscriptions all in one. Connect to ConvertKit or your CRM via Zapier or n8n. Avoid Skool's native checkout when you want flexibility on coupons, multi-currency, or installments.
ElevenLabs for voiceovers (your voice cloned, used on slides where re-recording is too slow). Submagic for short-form clips with auto-captions and B-roll. Loom for the unedited screen recordings that make up the bulk of the course.
Pick this if you're selling a $500-$2.000 course with a community lever. Don't pick it for $50 mini-courses (Skool's $99/mo overhead eats the margin) or for $10k+ programs (you need higher-end LMS + closed sales process).