Course Lab – Episode 99
Harnessing Community in Courses (Joachim Lépine)
Abe Crystal: It’s not so much the tool that’s important, but the process and facilitation around the tool. It seems like what he really focused on and was able to do effectively was to make sure that it’s very hands on in terms of how he connects with his students and brings them into a supportive community. And then both he and an assistant or facilitator are working to keep people engaged.
Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I’m Ari Iny, the director of growth at Mirasee, and I’m here with my co-host, Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku.
Abe: Hey there, Ari.
Ari: Today, we welcome Joe Lépine to the show. Joe is an accomplished translator and runs a company called Lion Translations. Through his online academy, he helps other translators master the art of translation. Thanks for joining us, Joe.
Joachim Lépine: Thank you so much for having me.
Ari: To kick things off, the question I like to ask is, could you give us the 30,000-foot view of yourself and how you came to the world of online courses?
Joachim: Yeah, absolutely. So translation was not my first career. I actually started out as a music teacher, a high school music teacher, of all things, and ended up going back to school and earning my degree in translation, which actually turned out to be a much better fit for me personality wise. I launched my own translation company and I had this key moment where I was with my wife and my mother-in-law, and she asked me how much I made because she was actually the bank advisor at the bank that I had to go to and had some transaction to do.
And when I told her how much I made, suddenly something clicked in my mind. I was like, oh my God. I went back to school for all these years and I’m barely making more than minimum wage. And in that moment, it’s like I thought, oh my God, you know, I’ve been through so much of my life. I’m starting a new career. If I’m going to do something new, I’m going to make a good living at it. And right then it’s like something switched, a flip went off in the brain. And I thought, I’m going to make this a six-figure career.
And so what I did, I launched my translation career like so many others. I loved it. You know, I’ve worked for many prestigious institutions translating their documents and books and all kinds of things. Magazines, you name it. But I also hired business coaches throughout those years. So that really helped me to develop the business side of things. And I realized that there’s a real lack of proper business training in the field of translation. It’s like everyone wants to translate, no one wants to learn the business side of it. And without that business side, you can really sort of have a fledgling career. But it’s hard to really make it.
So, long story short, I built up my translation business and at the same time I learned all these business concepts and I found that all the wonderful things I was learning were great, but not all of them were directly applicable to the world of translation. And I started putting together my own toolkit, if you will, of things that did work, all the wonderful strategies that I adapted or in some cases, that I created myself or that I tailored. And with the pandemic, I actually taught university courses in translation myself. And with the pandemic, there was this big boom toward online training. So I had a lot of requests for online training.
And it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that suddenly a light bulb went off in my mind. I thought, oh my God, I’ve accumulated all this wealth of business information and directly tailored it to translators, and there’s really a lack of support with these things on the market. So I ended up creating my own course and, and that’s why I came to Mirasee is to have a little bit of structure and to help do things right.
Ari: Could you tell us a little bit more about your course? Kind of what do you teach translators in this course? What exactly do you take them through?
Joachim: So this is a six-module journey that I take people through where they’re learning with sort of the reflection piece, because you really can’t know how to get to a goal until you’ve really taken stock of where you are. And so we start with identifying our participants avatars and their unique value proposition, and then we drill down further into their unique selling proposition. And this causes a lot of angst, but it’s also very, very productive work because we are often lacking that business perspective. So once they start to realize all the value they offer, then those become things they can build on. It starts to give them confidence in approaching clients that are perhaps a little bit more premium.
And from there we build into, or we go into how to build out their online and offline presence. So it’s really a very comprehensive course, and we get into prospecting as well, primarily using LinkedIn, but also other channels. And we finish off the course with some things about customer service, believe it or not, because that’s not something most translators were trained in. And we finish with some ideas about value pricing and how to charge based on value rather than on units of production, which is a big problem in our field.
Ari: Very cool. So it sounds like it’s really giving them everything they need to know have their own business.
Joachim: Well, that’s exactly right. And many of them technically have their own business, but in fact, they’re translating for agencies, and the agencies are sort of the middlemen, if you will, in the translation world. So many translators actually say they have a business, but they’re not building a business. You know, as long as you’re working for someone who’s doing your marketing for you and who’s taking a cut, you aren’t developing a clientele of premium clients. So you can certainly get by that way. But if you really want to roar, then you have to learn to do the marketing piece yourself. And it’s totally doable. It’s a learnable skill, but a lot of people have to learn that. So that’s kind of some of what we’re doing in our course.
Ari: And so the people that you’re attracting are mainly translators who essentially have a job but would like to have their own business. Or are they people who have their own business? They’re just not succeeding in their own business, and so they’re coming to you.
Joachim: Right. It’s really the latter. It’s what you just described. It’s mostly people who have already struck out on their own. They have their freelance business, but they’re perhaps not fulfilling their complete potential. And that’s what we’re working on in the course. We have had employees as well who are either preparing to switch into freelancing or who were, who wanted to learn skills just in case. So we have had a little bit of everything. But the main profile, if you will, of our participants is people who have their business but who are never really taught the business side of things and who can really succeed much more highly with a little bit of business know how.
Ari: Very cool. And so how long have you had this course? You were saying since the pandemic? People have been asking for it for online training. So how long has this been going on?
Joachim: Oh, it’s much more recent, in fact. So during the pandemic, that’s when I started being called upon to do training through Zoom all over the world for associations and different people. And in 2022, with my colleague Ann Marie Boulanger, we founded our own translation academy because we realized between the two of us, we had something like 30 or 40 different workshops that we could offer. And when you get to that point, it’s like hey, why don’t we create our own thing?
And so the idea was there early on because we did know that there was a demand, and we even created our own hybrid course early on after we created our business. And really, it was a great learning experience. But what I’m doing now is a much more developed version of that. It’s optimized now, of course, there’s still a lot of things to learn. I’m improving things as I go, but it’s much further along in terms of giving people the support they need, because that’s one of the big things I’ve learned, is that you can get people to buy a course, but if you want them to get the result, you really have to work with them.
It’s a team effort, really. Everyone has to work together. That’s why we have an online community now. We have a weekly call. I also offer help sessions. Like this week, my participants have a portfolio making help session. So not only do they have the training, but I’m also literally just opening up time where my assistant and myself were available. So she’s helping with the technical things on Canva and I’m there for content and for creative decision making.
So in a nutshell, it’s a very, very complete and I hope much improved version compared to our first attempt, that was a little bit of a shot in the dark. We knew there was a demand and we tried something, but thankfully, we also learned from our successes and also things that, frankly, didn’t work very well.
Abe: What were some of the things that didn’t work well?
Joachim: So I think really the most important one is the support piece because we had a lot of content, we had a lot of bonuses, you know, that got a lot of people on board. So we actually sold quite well with our first hybrid course. But I think the main thing was the support, and there are already enough courses out there that tell you the what. You know, you can even jump on YouTube and find some of the what and some of the how. But having someone work with you and say, oh, in your particular case, maybe this LinkedIn headline would be better, or maybe in this case, have you thought that you could branch out into this market that’s very closely connected to what you’re describing to me right now?
That kind of help is really where the breakthroughs I find happen, and that requires a little bit of working with people. That’s one reason why I love the hybrid course approach, because, yes, you’re providing content, but you’re also working with people in a meaningful way so they can have those key breakthroughs that I find do require a little bit of time on my part, time on the part of my assistant as well. I think having the two pieces is where we’re really getting a wow and getting traction. And people are posting a lot on LinkedIn. They’re excited about the course.
So I think that the main failure, I don’t want to use the word failure. I think everything is a learning opportunity, but in our first course, there was insufficient support, I think. And then sometimes just breaking things down into smaller pieces, because that’s what happens when you’re an expert at something. If you’ve been in something for many, many years, you’re an expert, you’re renowned. That’s great. But you develop a lot of implicit or tacit knowledge.
And then when people come to your course, you need to make that explicit. And that means that you need to slow down. It means you need to break things down into pieces. You need to organize it well and make sure people can ask questions and those kinds of things. Our first attempt was a lot of information, but not a lot of really adequate support for people to get from point A to point B.
Abe: Yeah. Thanks for clarifying. So are you saying that the first version or your pilot of the course was built around pre-recorded content, like videos or other pre developed content, as opposed to running live sessions with people, for example?
Joachim: Right. So just to track back, this was our first sort of fledgling attempt early on, like during the pandemic, that was not the pilot of what we’re doing now. The pilot for what I’m doing now, I launched quite recently. I had our first group in January, and now I’m already with a second group. And so that’s already a much more developed version. And so to answer your question more directly, the people do have their weekly call, but they also have the coaching check ins.
And one really wonderful thing that I discovered through Mirasee, how you can add the coaching check ins as strategic times within the lesson, so that people do have to earn them, in a manner of speaking. And so that way when they come to the coaching check in, they’re ready, they’re there, they’ve done a little bit of work, and you can have a 30 minutes call and have a breakthrough. And that’s already a big improvement because I had a little bit of coaching help with the first group, but it was sort of haphazard, like book an appointment anytime you need help. And I find it works much better to have strategic check ins.
And the next step is to have my admin. So my assistant she’s going to be able to take some of those calls as well in the future with future groups so that we can divide the workload in some ways, because I get to be a lot of hours in a lot of calls, which can be quite draining for a single person.
Abe: Yeah, I was just sort of trying to tease out the approaches for people listening who are maybe thinking about creating their first course or wondering how to go from step zero to step one or step one to step two. And something we often talk about in terms of iterative course development is running your pilot or your first test version of a course in a way that involves a lot of touch points, a lot of interaction with students. And so it sounds like that’s something that you kind of learned, you’re saying from your first, almost like pre pilot, what you did to this newer version.
Joachim: Yes, quite right. And I’ve only added more touch points as time has gone by because that’s critical. And sometimes just a few minutes of my time can make the whole difference from someone falling off the course and it’s just not happening to someone thriving and really getting a result. So, yes, that’s a really key part of it. So we’ve got the video modules every week, and then people come to the group call. On top of that, they’re getting their check ins when they get to strategic points within the course. So that’s sort of how we have it structured.
The other big change is that in the pilot group, I did not have a community. I didn’t think I needed one. I thought, you know, we’ll have videos and we’ll have a weekly call, and that’s all we need. But actually what I found quickly is that people wanted to speak amongst themselves. They wanted to be able to network with each other. You know, since we did have 25 people, it’s enough of volume where people were getting some real value out of speaking to each other and networking and working together on projects, and they had questions for each other sometimes.
So I got requests to create a community. So we have a Discord community for our group, and that’s been a huge success, I have to say. The interaction is great. People get a lot out of it. They’re very happy with the value that they get from that space.
Ari: And to what extent are you active in Discord? Are you moderating and answering questions or all that or is it mostly self-organized? You created the container, and they’re just running it themselves.
Joachim: Right. So what I’ve ended up doing is saying, I check in once a day. Sometimes, it’s once every two days. And my admin, or group manager, whatever you want to call her, Gwen does great job. She loves to give people links and helpful resources and encourage them, and she’s absolutely wonderful at that. So she does the day to day. Like, if I took a few days off, it wouldn’t really be a problem, but I like to check in as well so that I can get people unstuck.
And we have strategic channels, so we have, each module in the course has its own discord channel within the course. We also have one with questions for the next group call. Because that’s one important thing I discovered in our pilot, is that without some kind of a container for people to ask questions in advance, group calls can get a little bit disorganized, or one person can easily monopolize the group call through no ill intent of their own. It just happens, you know.
So it really helps, actually to create a space and to remind people to throw in some questions before the call so that you can just jump in, start answering questions, move through it. Everyone can get a little bit of help, get what they need. And yeah, those things do take time and planning and effort, but they really pay off.
Abe: I mean, we sometimes think of Discord as a tool that tends to appeal to people who are on the younger and tech savvier side of the Internet population. Is that how your audience tends to skew anyway, or did you see any issues with people being able to adopt Discord as a tool?
Joachim: No, it’s gone quite well, and I think that an important part of it is simply preparing them and saying, you know, for example, just post. Don’t worry if it’s in the wrong space. We’ll move your post or Gwen will remind you of where it can go. You know, it’s not a big deal. Just jump in. Our participants are actually, you know, a little bit on the older side. Like, if you look at the overall workforce, for example, translators tend to be, you know, a few years older than most workers, like all things taken together.
So it’s not a choice that we made specifically to cater to a younger audience. I think that it’s more. I liked Discord for its simplicity, and there are also just some little things I did not like about Slack personally. You know, I had problems logging in, constant double authentication, and I want to try to remove anything that can cause issues for participants because those friction points can quite quickly lead to people dropping off. It’s really important to have a strategy for those.
Ari: Do you have essentially 100% participation on Discord?
Joachim: I would not say 100%. Most of our participants are active there. Some people who join the course find that they join, and then one day, later they get a massive project and they’re completely swamped. Right. And I reassure them and I tell them, like, you can jump in, this is a ten-week course. You have time. That’s why we’ve made it a longer course, so that we can help people that are sort of different points along the journey. Is there 100% participation on discord? No, I think everyone is on there now, but not everyone contributes.
Some people absolutely love it. Some people have simply told me, I’m not a discord person. Just like some people love the group calls and some people hate them. Some people prefer the one on one, some people hate the one on ones. So I found that it’s good to have that mix. That’s one thing I love about the hybrid model, is that you can cater to all the different people. And if you’re organized and you have an admin like me for our Discord, then, although it is still time consuming, it’s 100% doable to have those multiple channels.
Abe: Any other things you tried or other lessons learned that you think would be helpful for other course creators to learn from you?
Joachim: Yeah, that’s a great question. I almost feel silly saying this because it’s such a simple thing, but I really organize things in threes. And really, whether you’re talking about an individual lesson or your modules, or how you’re going to talk about things within a call, when someone asks a question. Thinking in threes, I find is really great. It’s easy to remember things in threes. It makes things, um, easy to process for short term memory.
So, like, I know that some people really struggle with devising all their lessons and those kinds of things, but because I’m always thinking in threes and I’m always trying to make sure, maybe that’s another point I would add here, is just the same way. It’s great to have multiple channels in which people can interact. It’s really important within the lessons to also have multiple ways that people can engage in with that content. That’s also something I’ve improved because at first it was just watch the video and then come to the class, and now for practically every lesson I have an action step.
So it might be a really little thing, you know, it could be a drop a comment below and let me know how it’s going for you. It might be do this one thing on LinkedIn today. Write one word that comes to mind when you want to define this element. But I have an action step for virtually everything now, and they’re very small. And it’s really great because people are engaging. It creates discussion, it creates things to talk about in the group calls. So it’s great to not only engage in different ways during the calls and in our interaction, but also within the lessons, just having different modalities.
One thing that I want to incorporate in the future is transcripts as well of the video lessons, because some people love the videos and other people, especially translators, right? Their work with text. And so I’m not talking about interpreters, right. Interpreters translate. Live translators are translating text, and so these are people who love to read. And that’s one thing that never really came to mind when I was starting out. But today, thankfully, there are wonderful tools for transcription. So that’s the next step for me, is to get all the videos in the course transcribed so that people can either watch the video or read the text.
Ari: So one quick question in a completely different direction that occurred to me. We’ll see if there’s anything here or not. It occurs to me that the audience that you have, you know, these are all people who are essentially building a business in the same area. Have you had any people essentially balk at joining? Because, like, oh, I’m just going to go in with all my competitors and, you know, I don’t want to share my own process or anything like that because there are other people here that might steal it or anything like that. Did you have any of that? And what are your thoughts on that?
Joachim: Yeah, it’s a super interesting question. So there’s sort of two parts to it. In many cases, there is no problem because people are translating in different languages. We have people from all over the world, from South Africa to various parts of Europe to the US and Canada. So because people are working in different languages, there’s no issue. And even within the same language pair, there are completely different fields. You know, if someone’s in environmental translation and someone else does legal, there’s no real overlap as possible.
There are some cases where potentially some people within the course could be competitors, but I think that that’s something that we all happen to share within this group.
We tend to be people who choose not to view each other as competitors, but rather as potential collaborators, right? If you have too much work, it’s great to be able to call on someone else and send the work out and you can help each other, and that’s actually been another great thing about the discord community is that some of the participants have started working together, literally forming groups and taking on projects.
And so that’s been added value from the course. And it’s kind of magical to see that you create the container, you create the course, right? You do everything you can. It’s almost like watering a plant. And then one day it’s like this thing sprouts up. Boop. And you go, what’s that? And it’s really great. It’s really exciting. It’s very beautiful because the course takes on a life of its own and the participants start creating their own solutions based on what they’re learning. They start to implement it in creative ways, work together. So that’s been a really rewarding part of the journey as well.
Ari: Very cool. Before we wrap up, where can our audience go to learn more about you and your work, Joe?
Joachim: Our website is liontranslationacademy.com and we offer a range of workshops every month, some of them free, some of them paid. And people who want to go further can jump on the waitlist for our next iteration of Squeak to Roar. We’ve already got over 30 people on the waitlist for the fall, and we’re happy to take on everyone we can and help them as much as we can.
Abe: Good to have that. Yeah. Joe Lépine is a translator and trainer of translators. To learn more about his work, go to liontranslationacademy.com. That’s liontranslationacademy.com.
Danny Iny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show where Abe and Ari will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course.
Abe: All right, Ari, it is time for the debrief. Lots to catch up on here.
Ari: Yep.
Abe: But what were some of your favorite insights from Joe?
Ari: So one thing that stood out to me, just because we haven’t really heard many people who are using Discord before, is the fact that he is using it, and it seems to be working pretty well. I had the same concern or thought as you did, that it would not be for kind of the older, less tech savvy people that people might be working with. But it sounds like that’s his audience as well, and they seem fine with it. And it sounds like it’s a good additional place of touch point for him as a course creator, which is interesting.
Abe: What I took away from that discussion is that it’s not so much the tool that’s important, but the process and facilitation around the tool. It seems like what he really focused on and was able to do effectively was to make sure that it’s very hands on in terms of how he connects with his students and brings them into a supportive community. And then both he and an assistant or facilitator are working to keep people engaged. And so that’s a process that could work with almost any tool, right, if you’re going to be that committed to it,
Ari: Absolutely.
Abe: I think I would be hesitant to have people take away the idea that they just need to set up a Discord server for their course and invite people to it and it’ll be off to the races. To me, it’s much more about the facilitation was the key win here.
Ari: 100%. I mean, it used to be that the default was a Facebook group, which also, unless you’re in it, it doesn’t actually do much to support the learning and the course. So same idea, but I do like it as an additional tool. But one thing that he mentioned is that he specifically chose Discord over, for instance, Slack because he had some bad experiences with Slack and figured that his students would have similar experiences. And so just thinking about the people who he is serving and making sure that whatever tool he does choose, assuming that he’s going to put in the effort to support it properly, is actually aligned with what his people would actually be able to do and would be able to use and would use effectively.
Abe: Yeah, I mean, that gets to process as well, right. So another sort of theme in his experience is just the importance of getting back to basics and on process. And as much as we talk about it, there still seems to be a pretty prevalent perception or mental model people have that courses are about packaging information. And we just have to find new and creative ways to say that courses are not about just packaging information. One way for that lesson to sink in is to hear actual stories of where people tried that and it didn’t work.
So hopefully what will resonate with people here is Joe tried that and it didn’t work, right, tried to just put together some information about how to have a better translation business and sell it to people. And yeah, he got interest, right? so that validated that people wanted the help with the problem he was solving. So that was great. But when it was just information, without the structure, the support, the community, it wasn’t actually effective in helping people reach their goals.
Ari: Yeah, I feel like many people, they get very caught up in the first step of the process, which is selling. And I mean, he was saying he was able to sell like, you know, he didn’t have a problem there, but people weren’t getting the results. And the only way to sell long term and have a long-term thriving business is to create good results for your clients. And so he definitely learned that and is doing a lot of work. And it sounds like now he’s trying to figure out ways to actually spend a little less of his time personally interacting with people one on one, because it sounds like it’s gotten to be a lot, but he’s seen the importance of it and is really putting in the effort to make sure that people are getting the support they need.
Abe: Anything else that was on your list to review?
Ari: I was just looking over my notes. Nope, that’s it.
Abe: I guess just a final piece that we could reiterate for people is this also just recapitulates the value of understanding and serving a very narrow and focused audience. The group of people is very clear. It’s professional translators. There’s just no ambiguity about who he’s serving. And he’s not trying to do everything for that group either. It’s really about helping them with their marketing and client acquisition and having a thriving business he doesn’t also try to tackle like here’s how you become a more nuanced and effective translator of Italian or whatever, and here’s how you do all these other things that translators need to do. I
t’s got a clear focus. So again, just remembering these fundamentals of iterative course design for a very narrow and focused group of people, that alone takes you so much farther than the kind of, unfortunately, the naive approach to course development that we often see.
Ari: Yep, 100%.
Abe: Joe Lépine is a translator and trainer of translators. To learn more about his work, go to liontranslationacademy.com. That’s liontranslationacademy.com.
Thank you for listening to Course Lab. I’m Abe Crystal co-founder and CEO of Ruzuku, here with my co-host Ari Iny. Course Lab is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Once Upon a Business and Making It. If you don’t want to miss the excellent episodes coming up on Course Lab, follow us on YouTube or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you’re enjoying our show, please go ahead and leave us a starred review. It really does make a difference. Thank you, and we’ll see you next time.
All right, Ari, do you know who we’re talking to next time?
Ari: Next time. We’ve got Oliver Gleeson. He helps early career professionals think, act, and perform like C level executives.
Abe: That sounds really interesting.
Ari: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it.