How to build an online course without your videos going free on WhatsApp
An online course is a set of lessons in order that your student unlocks by paying. To keep it from giving itself away, upload the video to your site — a YouTube link can be watched by anyone who gets it.
Itzel is a makeup artist in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. On Saturdays she runs a self-makeup workshop at her studio — eight spots, $1,200 — and it almost always fills up. The ones who couldn’t get a spot, many from Comitán and San Cristóbal, kept asking her the same thing: “don’t you have an online course?” So she recorded the workshop, uploaded it to YouTube as an unlisted video, and started sending the link over WhatsApp to everyone who transferred her $850.
In three weeks, eleven people paid. Then she opened YouTube Studio: the video had 380 views. Sure, one student might watch a video five times. Eleven students don’t add up to 380.
If you want to sell what you already know how to do, that gap gets closed first — before the syllabus, before the price.
What is an online course?
An online course is a set of lessons in order — video, text, and files — that your student unlocks on your site once she pays, and works through at her own pace. What sets it apart from sending videos over WhatsApp is that the site knows who paid, which lesson each person is on, and when they finished.
Why doesn’t a YouTube link protect your course?
Because the link is the video. An unlisted video won’t turn up in search, but anyone with the link can watch it — no account, no payment — and a link forwards in two taps.
And here’s the catch: this holds true even if you embed the link inside a page that charges for access. The page can lock the lesson, but not the video — anyone who copies the YouTube address sees the whole thing, whether they paid or not.
What actually locks it down is uploading the video to your site instead of pasting in a link. That way the video has no public address. Every time your student hits play, the site checks that she has access and hands her a link that expires quickly; if she forwards it, it stops working soon after. PDFs you upload to each lesson work the same way.
The limit: nothing stops someone from screen-recording. What you stop giving away is the easy case — the link pasted into the cousins’ group chat. In Itzel’s case, that was almost the whole leak.
How do you put together the syllabus?
By section, with one single thing per lesson. A 10-to-15-minute lesson gets finished on the bus ride; a one-hour lesson gets left half-watched.
Itzel split her four-hour workshop into three sections — Skin, Eyes, and Lips & Setting — and nine lessons: prepping the skin, choosing your foundation shade, concealer, eyeliner… Each lesson has its video, its length, and, when it’s needed, a file; hers is a product list with drugstore prices.
In Proyecta, two details:
- The syllabus is built from the lessons. Each lesson states which section it belongs to, and that’s what generates the index. You can’t advertise a chapter that doesn’t have anything in it yet.
- The syllabus stays visible to everyone, with titles and lengths; it’s the content that’s locked. The index is what convinces someone to buy.
If you have extra material — Itzel has a lesson on photo makeup — mark it as Optional. It shows up in the syllabus, but doesn’t count toward finishing the course.
Which lesson do you give away?
One, and it should solve something complete on its own. The lesson marked Free preview can be watched by anyone without paying, and it’s the one that decides whether someone buys.
Don’t give away the welcome lesson — it doesn’t teach anything. Itzel gives away “how to choose your foundation shade”: ten minutes, a problem everyone has, and a result you can see in the mirror that same day. And since that one’s free anyway, that’s where you can go ahead and use the YouTube link you already had.
All at once, or one section a week?
It depends on whether you want people to finish it or just save it for later. Each lesson can unlock a set number of days after that specific student paid, so everyone moves at the same pace starting from their own day one.
The days don’t stack on top of each other: for one section a week, the first is set to 0, the second to 7, and the third to 14. If you’d rather have a group that starts together, set a fixed date and no one gets in early. And if you turn off Open enrollment between one cohort and the next, the students who already paid can still get in.
How do you know if people are actually taking it?
Because the site tracks each student’s progress, and in your dashboard, inside each course, you can see which lessons each person has finished: the one already on lesson 7, and the one who paid a month ago and is still on lesson 2. That second one is worth reaching out to.
Your student logs in with her email so the site remembers where she left off: she can see how many lessons she’s completed, and the video picks up right where she paused it.
If you want her to prove she learned something, a lesson can include a short quiz with a minimum passing score, say 70. The correct answers never reach her phone, so she can’t take them off the site, and the lesson doesn’t count as finished until she passes it.
What does your student get when she finishes?
A certificate with a folio number, sent to her by email as soon as she completes the last required lesson. With that folio number, anyone can open a public page and verify that the certificate is real: it shows the course, the date, and her name — nothing more.
For Itzel’s students, that matters more than a pretty diploma. Many of them want to start charging for makeup work, and a client can verify a folio number — anyone can edit a PDF made in Canva.
What doesn’t the site do for you?
- It doesn’t record or edit your classes. A phone on a tripod next to a window is enough; what isn’t enough is a two-hour video with no cuts.
- Quizzes are written when the course is built. The questions and their answers go into what you describe to Proyecta; your dashboard doesn’t yet have a convenient editor for changing them, so a change still has to be requested the same way.
How to ask Proyecta for it
Here’s how Itzel described it:
“An online self-makeup course for my studio in Tuxtla. Three sections: skin, eyes, and lips and setting. Nine lessons of 10 to 15 minutes each, with video and a product list in PDF. The one about choosing your foundation shade, free as a sample. One optional extra lesson on photo makeup. A short quiz at the end of each section, a certificate on completion, $850 one-time payment.”
Out comes the course page, with the syllabus visible and the buy button. In your dashboard you upload each video to its lesson, and the ones that don’t have one yet show up marked “No material yet.”
Before that, do what Itzel did: open YouTube Studio, find the video you’ve been sending out, and compare its views against the payments you received. If the numbers are close, you’re in good shape. If not, now you know where the difference went — and when you’re ready to close it, describe it to Proyecta and publish it.