I hope you’re more excited than overwhelmed by the EBC Builder. I’m going to be explicit about when, where, and how to make the most of those resources.

Here’s the great news: right now, you can pretty much ignore them. Feel free to take a little tour, but until we get into Chapter 2, we’re mostly focused on getting you set up for success.

As for today’s content

It's all about what you'll use. Chapter 4 is where we'll get into the details of how you'll use it. For your sake, I'm giving my personal preferences (I’ve trialed a LOT of technology over the past 3 years). For an email-based course, the most important piece of tech is... your email service provider. Shocker, right?

I am a huge fan of beehiiv.

The platform gets better every day, they provide great service, the automations are easy to build, and the email builder is exceptional.

Mailerlite and Convertkit are also great! But with the new features that beehiiv has coming, I’ll be able to use it for everything. In addition to the course, I’ll be able to replace my landing page, my survey tool, my integration tools, and likely even my affiliate software.

If you're just about to make your email service provider selection

Let me save you some time: I’ve trialed SendinBlue, Active Campaign, MailChimp, Drip, Campaign Monitor, and Hubspot. When it comes to EBCs, beehiiv is a winner.

Next, you'll need a landing page to sell the course.

Here’s how I play it: My “Mastering the Email-Based Course” landing page is built on Notion (which I love -- it's also free), and I got the emailbasedcourse domain set up with some slick customizations and themes through a $12/month service called Super.so.

Other free products I use

Figma (for designing the header images and progress tracker), Tally (for surveys), and Zapier and Make. If you don’t have a design or survey tool already, I’d check out the links at the bottom to get accounts set up — no action required beyond that.

*if you’re just using Zapier to connect Stripe, Convertkit (or some other ESP), Tally, and other “non-premium” apps, then it’s free for 100 tasks per month, up to 5 zaps… which you'll likely be able to get away with.

I'm also a fan of the Grammarly extension and would be a liar if I didn't mention ChatGPT... it's a solid editor!

As a general rule

I try not to link out to anything until the very end of the email. You can lose people to fun links and it's hard to get them back. So here I am, living my truth... here are links to all the assets I mentioned above:

• Beehiiv

• Convertkit

• Mailerlite

• Tally.so

• Figma

• Zapier

That's all for this email. See you soon.