It’s all there: the recordings, the handouts, the notes you teach from. What isn’t there is the structure, the sections in order, the lessons in order, a check at the end, and a site that sells it. That part takes the evenings you’d rather spend teaching, so the course stays a folder.
Courses stall between the plan and the build: first the shape takes real thought, then the hours of putting it together. A course is something a student finishes, so its shape matters more than any other offer’s. What do they learn first? What can they do at the end that they couldn’t at the start? Where does the check go, so they know they’ve got it?
Building that by hand means lesson after lesson of copying, ordering and formatting, and general AI tools that promise to help tend to hand back a wall of text instead of something the course plugin will accept. Meanwhile the hosted course platforms are a click away, and they’re easy to start on.
MemberPress.ai builds the course and its offers on your own WordPress install, from a conversation. Setup adds the offers to your site as drafts, plus an empty course on Free, and they stay drafts until you publish them. On paid, the course outline with lesson briefs arrives afterwards as a draft you publish. What it sets up:
On the paid plan, tell it what the course covers, in your own words, and it drafts the course outline, its sections in order, in the exact shape MemberPress Courses needs. Then it drafts the lessons. Everything saves as a draft until you publish it. On the free plan, setup creates an empty course for you to build out.
A free level, the course itself sold once, and a cohort level for the students who want live, ongoing support. Which lessons each one opens is yours to set, with MemberPress’s access rules.
Once students join, it reads your members and revenue and tells you what’s working, what’s leaking, and what to change.
The free level, the course sold once and the cohort level arrive as drafts, with the Join and Checkout pages. Opal tells you what’s left before a student can buy.
You connect your own Stripe or PayPal in MemberPress, and every sale of the course lands in your account.
Publish, send the link to the people who kept asking when the course was coming, and your first student pays on your site.
Once students join, Opal reads your own numbers and tells you what’s working, what’s leaking and what to fix next.
Choose a site you own if you want your student list and payment gateway to stay yours, and the assembly work done for you. Teachable, Thinkific and Kajabi are built for exactly this, and they do a lot well. Teachable and Thinkific put quizzes, dripped lessons, communities and checkout in one place, with certificates on the higher plans. Kajabi is also the website, the email tool and the checkout, with communities included, so there’s one login for everything.
The trade-off is that the school lives on their platform, and the plans come with limits your school can outgrow: how many products or students you have, which features you get, and, on some plans and payment setups, an extra transaction fee. MemberPress.ai runs on a WordPress site you own, with your student list and your payment gateway staying yours, and it does the assembly work that usually keeps a course in a folder.
Founder · Rooted
Priya runs Rooted, an online yoga course membership. She has the PDFs and the videos, but nothing structured into an actual course, and between teaching and running the business she’s short on time. She’d been comparing Teachable’s and Kajabi’s fees against building it herself.
Watch Priya's interview (video)
Hi, I'm Opal from MemberPress.ai, and this is Priya.
She runs Rooted, an online yoga membership for her students.
Folders of PDFs, hours of videos, and no course.
I teach yoga.
My students want a real program, but I'm teaching all week.
That's what I'm for.
I build and run your membership site.
Could it be a six-week beginner course?
Just talk to me.
I'll build it with you, step by step, and you stay in charge.
That's the part I never had time for.
Members like Aaliyah stream a flow after the kids are asleep.
Now I just teach.
Priya Raman on moving Rooted onto her own site
Teachable's course builder was easy to set up. Priya wanted her course in an order, under her own name, on her own site.
Hi, I'm Opal from MemberPress.ai.
This is Priya.
She teaches yoga, and this used to be her Monday.
A folder of videos, a stack of PDFs, and 12 emails.
Which one do I watch first?
What did a week look like before?
Teaching five classes, answering the same three questions on repeat, and telling myself I'd "build the course" on Sunday.
Sunday never came.
You were on Teachable for a while.
About a year.
It's not a bad platform.
Their course builder really is easy to set up.
But every sale, they take a cut.
On top of what I already pay them monthly.
So what was the actual problem?
It wasn't mine.
It was theirs.
My students were on Teachable's site, not mine.
My brand, with someone else's name on the receipt.
What changed in month one with MemberPress?
I stopped paying a transaction fee on every sale and the course finally has an order.
Six weeks, one lesson a week, dripped automatically so nobody binges it in a night and quits.
And a few months in?
I have members, not just buyers.
Aaliyah's been with me since spring.
She streams a flow after her kids are asleep.
What got better, really?
I teach.
I don't admin a storefront anymore.
The site just runs.
Priya Raman, course creator, formerly of Teachable.
Thanks for talking to me.
Thanks for building the thing I never had time to build.
A MemberPress course in the shape the plugin needs: an outline with its sections in order, and lessons drafted into those sections. General AI tools tend to get those formats wrong; this is the part it gets right. Asking in the chat never writes a quiz; you add one in MemberPress Courses yourself. On the paid plan, an AI assistant you connect to your account can draft one into a course section, if your site has the MemberPress Quizzes add-on. Drafting the course is part of the paid plan; on free, setup creates an empty course for you to build out.
No. The course arrives as a draft. You read it, edit anything you like, and publish when it’s ready.
Yes. The starting setup creates a one-time purchase level and a separate cohort level for ongoing support. The course itself comes separately: on the paid plan it’s drafted for you, and on free setup creates an empty course for you to build out. What each one opens, including whether the cohort includes the course, is yours to set with MemberPress’s access rules.
It doesn’t import files, videos or recordings. On the paid plan, describe what the course covers and it drafts the structure on your own site; your material goes into the lessons from there. On free, you start from the empty course setup creates.
Connect your site and tell it what the course covers; Opal gets you to your first student and tells you what’s working after.
Dues, renewal season and the board’s questions, on a site the association owns.
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Read more →Reader tiers and renewals that keep running, on a site you own.
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