[May Digest] Live webinar with Teachable, 2024 WWDC, quickly renaming files and more...
Published over 1 year ago • 11 min read
The Monthly Digest
Macpreneur retrospective from May 2024
Hi Reader,
I hope your solopreneur business is doing well and you're not too impacted by the global events happening right now.
This is the second edition of the Monthly Digest.
To opt out of these monthly updates or to unsubscribe completely, just scroll down to the bottom where you'll see both options.
TL;DR
In this edition, I share my experience hosting a live webinar from within a Teachable course lesson and give you my expectations from Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) starting on June 10.
This month's Mactip will help you quickly rename a bunch of files using the built-in capability of macOS.
My pick this month automatically and securely backs up my precious data to the cloud for a very affordable flatfee.
Affiliate disclosure: Some of the links in this email are special, because if you click on them and make a purchase, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s like a virtual high-five for recommending stuff I love and genuinely believe in.
What's up?
Hosting a live webinar with Teachable
On May 30, I hosted a live webinar from inside a lesson of a Teachable course, and I wanted to share with you what went well, what didn't go so well and what I'll change for next time.
But first, you might be wondering why on earth anyone would want to host a live webinar inside an online course platform like Teachable.
I get it!
First off, I decided to go all in with Teachable because it's the onlyplatform today capable of hosting online courses, selling digital products, coaching and memberships, while, and here's the kicker, takingcare of the taxstuff for me.
Yes, unlike Kajabi, Podia, Thinkific and the like, Teachable acts as merchant of records, meaning that they sell what I offer on my behalf, take their cut and handle any tax-related admin stuff for me.
This is a huge stress and pain-saver when selling online to a worldwide audience.
There are other online services that act as merchant of records, like Gumroad, Lemonsqueezy and Skool, however, they limit what I can sell through them, and what is excluded/forbidden is usually 1-on-1 services like remote coaching for instance.
On top of that, Teachable allows to craft much better-looking sales pages, and offers direct integration with ConvertKit, minimizing the need to use Zapier for automation.
Second, I decided to use Teachable for the webinar because I wanted an easy way to offer two signup options:
free for live attendees
paid to get access to the replay for 7 days
What I realized is that it's possible to create 2 pricing plans for the same product, and define a different access cutoff date for each of them.
So the strategy was for the free pricing plan to give access to the webinar area until the day of the webinar and for the paid pricing plan to offer access until June 6 included.
And since the webinar area was in fact a Teachable course, the idea was to drip the module containing the replay video the day after the webinar.
In other words, Teachable would take care of removing access to people on the free plan on May 31, so that I wouldn't need to manually do that.
And thanks to the direct integration between Teachable and ConvertKit, webinar registrants got tagged according to the pricing plan that they chose and added to the proper email sequences.
Again, a pretty significant time saver.
Third, the rationale for hosting the live webinar inside Teachable was two-fold:
I wanted to use Ecamm Live and my current plan limits what I can do with Zoom
I wanted to avoid Zoom because more and more participants are using AI recording agents like Fathom or Otter that can seamlessly connect to Zoom meetings
I started testing this with YouTube Live and the lag was a bit too much for my taste.
On top of that, it's impossible to hide or remove the "Watch on YouTube" button from the embedded player so there was a big risk that participants would leave Teachable.
The next option was Twitch and the latency was much smaller than with YouTube Live, making it almost real-time.
In addition, there was an easy option to pop the player out allowing the participants to still see me, while practicing along.
And I could configure Twitch so that no recording would be available on the platform after the live stream.
So I created a lesson containing an embedded Twitch player and decided to use built-in Teachable comments for the live chat.
What went well
I am pleased with the landing page design options for a Teachable course and with the ability to offer both a free and paid option at signup.
Having a direct integration between Teachable and ConvertKit made my life much easier than anticipated.
I also realized that adapting the ConvertKit rules and automations for future webinars will be very easy too.
Using Ecamm Live for a presentation mixing slides and live demos helps producing a slick webinar, especially in conjunction with a Stream Deck.
What didn't go so well
Using the built-in Teachable comments as live chat was a bad idea, simply because the lesson page doesn't refresh automatically.
That meant I needed to remember to manually refresh the page every few minutes otherwise I'd miss a question or comment.
As a consequence, it perturbed the flow of the webinar and slowed it down a bit, while potentially frustrating the person who commented.
Another issue was that I misunderstood Teachable's help document with regards to the cutoff date, meaning that the free plan participants still had access to the webinar area on May 31.
As a consequence, I had to delay access to the replay by one day and manually change the drip date for that module.
Something else I didn't realize was that Twitch advertises the channels that are live streaming, so there were Twitch users who watched the webinar directly on that platform.
To be honest, this situation made me feel awkward during the webinar and it affected a bit my delivery too.
The last issue I encountered was with the post-webinar email sequence that was setup to send different emails based on a tag which was supposed to mimic the actual attendance of the participants.
The problem was that I had no automation in place and completely forgot to manually tag the live participant.
Consequently, they received an email entitled "We've missed you..." which was not good 😬
What I'll change next time
I'll host the webinar via Zoom next time and upgrade my Ecamm Live plan to the Pro level which now integrates seamlessly with Zoom.
Not only will this allow for real time chat interaction but I'll also be able to pull comments and questions from the chat into the live stream using Ecamm.
Participants will still signup from a Teachable landing page but next time I'll setup two Zapier automations:
One to register them to the Zoom meeting which will send them the link automatically
The other to tag them in ConvertKit as soon as they join the meeting
The last change I'll make is by offering 3 registration options:
Free for those who can attend live
$7 to get 7-day access to the replay video
$47 for those who'd like to book a 30-min implementation call afterwards
I'm curious, what do you think about the changes I'm planning to make?
Have you already organised something similar and if so, what tool did you use?
2024 WWDC
On June 10, 2024, Apple will kick off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote introducing the next versions of its operating systems: iOS & iPadOS 18, macOS 15, watchOS 11, tvOS 15 and visionOS 2.
The keynote will most likely consist in live streaming a pre-recorded video, which will take place at 7pm Luxembourg time (10am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern, 6pm in the UK and 3am on the next day in Australia).
All the tech pundits that I follow expect Apple to unveil new generative AI-based capabilities across all its operating systems, which is fuelled by alleged negotiations between Apple and OpenAI.
As I've mentioned in episode 79 of the Macpreneur podcast, we, Apple users, are already experiencing the power of Artificial Intelligence without realizing it.
Predictive text and dictation already leverage AI, as well as the ability to detect text in images in videos.
In the Photos app, the automatic indexing and cataloguing of images based on their content relies on machine learning and AI, which runs locally and privately on our devices.
My biggest hope is for Siri to get a virtualbraintransplant and to start, finally, understanding everything I say, especially through CarPlay.
When my daughters and I want to have a quick laugh while driving, one of us just starts talking to Siri, and sooner rather than later, it starts spitting out nonsense or resorts to telling us to search the web.
Thanks, Siri!
Very helpful (not)!
If the rumours about a potential partnership between Apple and OpenAI are true, then I can't wait to beta test iOS 18 and Siri 2.0 on my older iPhone XR (provided that it will be supported, of course).
As usual, it’ll be possible to watch the WWDC Keynote (live and the replay) from various places:
Are you using Siri, and if so, what do you think of its accuracy and usefulness?
Are you planning to watch the Keynote live on June 10 or the replay afterwards?
Mac tip
Sometimes we need to rename a bunch of files and manually repeating the same operation is both boring and unproductive.
But did you know that macOS integrates a quite versatile file renamer?
It can do 3 types of renaming operations:
Replace text inside the current name
Add text before or after the current name
Format the filename according to 3 possible schemes:
Name and index (i.e. Conference picture 1)
Name and counter (i.e. Conference picture 00001)
Name and current date & time (i.e. Conference picture 10-06-2024 at 19.00.00)
In all three formatting cases, it's possible to specify whether the index, counter or date is located before or after the new name.
Here's the process:
Select all the files that need to be renamed (at leat 2 files)
Right-click on one of the selected files and choose the "Rename…" option.
Here is an example when I needed to replace part of the name for several files related to episode 95:
Neat, isn't it?
For more customization (i.e. specifying the number of digits for the counter or the last modified date instead of the current date), you have two options:
Option 1: Creating an Automator workflow
Option 2: Using a third-party file renamer
Automator is a free automation tool developed by Apple and which comes with macOS.
It's available in the Applications folder and here's a LifeWire article explaining how to create a dedicated workflow to batch rename multiple files:
A lot, I guess, and probably much more than what’s currently sitting in your bank account, right?
What if I told you that you could safely (and automatically) backup your Mac’s precious data (and everything stored on all external hard drives connected to it) for less than 2 Venti Americano per month.
And the best part is that you can create your own encryption key, making it impossible for anyone (including Backblaze) to access your data.
Personally, I cannot imagine not using Backblaze which protects more than 4 TB of my own business and personal data.
Starting at just $9 per month or $99 per year, you get by default 30-day version history, which you can bump to a full year in a single click.
At this point you might be thinking to yourself: "But Damien, my data is already on iCloud/Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive, so it's already backed up, right?"
Wrong!
Those are cloud storage and synchronization services, NOT cloud backups.
See, a true cloud backup solution makes a copy of your files that is totally independent from the original.
In other words, if a file on your computer gets deleted, the cloud backup performed by Backblaze stays intact and vice-versa.
With iCloud/Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive, as soon as you delete a file from any of your devices or the web, this file is gone everywhere.
On top of that, deleted files are recoverable for only a short period of time, usually between 30 and 90 days, unless you pay extra or get a higher tiered plan.
And then comes the question of privacy and whether the cloud storage provider can access your data.
Unless you've turned on "Advanced Data Protection for iCloud", Apple can access files stored iCloud Drive and the content of all your iCloud backups.
With Dropbox and OneDrive, there is no native way to fully encrypt your files, whereas with Google Drive, it's possible but requires a paid Google Workspace account, is cumbersome to setup and has some limitations when it comes to editing encrypted documents.
What I like with Backblaze is that it's possible to password-protect all the backed up files in such a way that Backblaze can't see them, even if compelled by the government.
I've tested many cloud backup solutions since I started running my business on my Mac and Backblaze remains the easiest and most cost-effective one by far, without compromising security or privacy.
So if you haven't yet implemented an offsite backup strategy yet, you ought to give Backblaze a try.
PS: If your business is based in the EU, you can choose to store your cloud backup in a datacenter located in the Netherlands(just click on the “Region” menu under the signup form).
Macpreneur episodes
Episode 95
In this episode, you’ll discover an Excel-based system that I developed to forecast the profitability of EasyTECH.
In this episode, you’ll discover the finance management tools used by three fellow solopreneurs: Susanna Reay, Roland Hüse, and Anna Lundberg, and insights on optimizing the finance side of your business.
PS: Not sure where to start streamlining your solopreneur business? My 360° Tech diagnostic is currently 50% off for a limited time. Learn more by visiting https://macpreneur.com/diagnostic
