Course Delivery
How a paying student finds exactly the right lesson at the right time, and how a cohort of eight to twelve people actually moves through it together. This is the engine that serves Paid, Paid-Pro, Mentor, and Admin.
Verdict
HYBRID — build-light on plugged-in services. Never build authentication, payments, or video hosting yourself; those are solved problems and you buy them. What you build is the thin layer on top: the part that surfaces the right content to the right person and runs the cohort loop week to week. For groups of eight to twelve people meeting live, you do not need a heavyweight LMS at all — most of what those platforms charge for is scale you don't have. The whole experience is video, conversation, and a live call. Keep that simple.
What it does
- Per-persona content surfacing. A Student sees only their cohort and their course — nothing else. A Paid-Pro unlocks the 15-month track and a private 1:1 space for coaching notes. A Mentor sees the one cohort they host plus facilitator tools. Each person logs in and finds only what's theirs.
- The delivery loop. Pre-watch the video → answer the async per-lesson discussion question → meet on the live call → take away an assignment or WOOP. This mirrors exactly how Jer already teaches on Radix, so there's no new pedagogy to invent — just a place to run it.
- Student-to-student discussion. Per-lesson and per-cohort threaded conversation, written by the students themselves. At eight-to-twelve scale this is trivial to build and deeply on-brand — the conversation is where the soul-deep work happens.
- Lesson and cohort stats. Completion, time-on-lesson, which discussion questions actually drew engagement, and pre/post survey deltas. This is the data that later becomes the evidence story for B2B.
How we'd build it
The core decision, in two horizons:
NEAR-TERM (one cohort, 8-12, meeting live). You do not need a full LMS. Pre-watch video (Vimeo or an unlisted YouTube link) + an async discussion thread + a live Zoom is the entire loop. That's a light build of a day or two, or simply one more cycle on Radix while it's still available. Do not buy Kajabi (~$150/mo) to serve twelve people — it's built for a problem you don't have.
OWNED PLATFORM (before March 2027). This is the real fork in the road:
- BUILD-LIGHT — a thin custom app sitting on plugged-in services: auth (Clerk or Supabase), video (Mux or Vimeo), database (Supabase/Postgres), email. Full brand control, exact per-persona surfacing, and the content is yours — no silo.
- BUY all-in-one — Circle or Heartbeat (~$49-89/mo). Zero maintenance, but a generic feel, and your content lives in someone else's house.
Recommendation: build-light. Three reasons converge — the premium "529 Steakhouse" brand deserves more than a generic community template; Jer is rightly wary of "borrowing a vehicle" after the Radix experience; and building is roughly ten times cheaper now than it was. Keep BUY as the lower-maintenance hedge if a week of build time isn't available. (This refines the "Heartbeat or Circle" line in the Strategy Brief — the buy option is still sound, it's just no longer the default.)
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│ Thin custom app │
│ (per-persona surfacing, │
│ cohort loop, discussion) │
└─────────────────────────────┘
│ │ │ │
┌───┴──┐┌──┴───┐┌──┴────┐┌─┴────┐
│ Auth ││Video ││ DB ││Email │
│Clerk ││ Mux ││Supa- ││ │
│Supa- ││Vimeo ││ base ││ │
│base ││ ││ ││ │
└──────┘└──────┘└───────┘└──────┘
you buy / plug in — never build theseEffort & cost
Build-light owned platform: roughly a week of AI-assisted build, then cheap services — auth on a free tier, video paid per usage, database free or near-free. Buy: $49-89/mo, forever. Near-term lightweight space: a couple of days of build, or just keep Radix for one more cycle at no new cost.
When
Phase 2 — run the cohort. Migrate off Radix before March 2027; it's borrowed from the mission org and disappears at the handover. The owned-platform spend is income-floor-aware — build-light keeps fixed monthly cost near zero, which matters while the business is finding its footing.
Connects to
The student-discussion design here is the small-room counterpart to the public feed discussed in Community & The Pack. The lesson stats feed directly into Instrumentation & Evidence, which turns engagement data into B2B proof. The curriculum being delivered lives in Course Design. This page is the concrete build behind the Strategy Brief's "The delivery stack," and the Radix migration timing is set out in The Path. For the wider platform picture, see The Platform.