A Podia Wishlist

I use Podia to host my SEO MBA courses and I love it. I chose Podia because they seemed to have the best student UX on the market.

Clean, simple and easy to use. Perfect.

I’m very happy with Podia - but here’s a list of random feature requests that I’d like to see in the future:

1. Email 2.0

Email needs a big overhaul. Not only has the setup bitten me in the ass a few times but it’s also confusing to use. For example:

• When I enroll people manually in my course, I didn’t realize that they don’t enroll in the email series. There’s apparently no way to fix this.
• When a user receives the last email in a sequence they exit the campaign. So if you add more emails later on they won’t receive them.

Some wishlist items:

1. The workflow for email automation is terrifying. I have to pause the whole thing in order to edit it and the confirmation message always seems to suggest I’m about to send 100s of emails (when in reality it’s telling me how many people match the entry criteria).
2. Email layout and design isn’t great - and unless you’re really careful with images it breaks mobile layouts.
3. The CMS for editing and sending emails is very basic.

Ideally I’d like to be able to use Podia to both run my free newsletter (currently on Substack) as well as mini email courses all the way up to full advanced workflows, segmentation and activation via email for customers.

2. Course Tiers & Gated Content

I sell my courses with two tiers to offer perks and add-ons. This requires a bit of a workaround inside Podia.

Ideally there would be some way to add content to a course that is only available as an add-on or premium access. This would both make it easier to make the course (making the course once inside Podia) but might also offer a natural up-sell opportunity.

In addition to this - upgrade pricing would be great. Being able to change the price of a product based on whether they already purchased something. Right now I have a total hack solution for this (requiring Stripe payment)….

3. Make Certificate Completion Conditional

Right now, if you watch all the videos you get a certificate. Ideally I’d like the option to make receiving a certificate conditional on submitting an assignment or something. This would help the certificate mean something, and would encourage assignment completion.

4. Lightweight CRM

There’s very little information about each customer. Ideally I’d be able to see a bit more information about:

• Where they came from
• Their site & course usage / comments
• What emails they’re subscribed to / received
• Maybe a notes field so I can make notes on the backend like “Paid via Stripe 6/10 manually enrolled”

5. Company Enrollment

Since my course is targeted at business users and businesses I have a lot of users expensing the course. Some feature requests for selling to businesses:

• I spend a lot of time manually recreating invoices so that customers can have an invoice that shows the info they need (typically biz address and tax info)
• The ability to whitelist a domain - i.e. let anyone with an @companyX.com domain enroll in a course.
• It would be nice to have a feature where you can purchase multiple seats in a course and then delegate the access to a list of email addresses. Right now this all happens manually (payment via Stripe, get list of email addresses, enroll each one individually) - and note how when I do this all of those people never receive the email automation series :(

6. Live Cohort Courses

Maven seems to be doing well. It would be great to have the ability to run a cohort based live course via Podia. Especially if it integrates with existing videos / course materials so folks have access to that too.

Right now you can sell access to a webinar but a full live cohort course would be great (esp if it comes with a community too!)

7. Affiliate Codes for Custom Sites

This is a minor quibble but affiliate codes only work if you send traffic to a Podia hosted site, but I send 100% of my traffic through my own custom built landing pages. It would be great if affiliate codes could work there too.

8. Community Access for Courses

Right now, you can bundle access to a course for people that buy access to a community. But you can’t do the reverse. I’d like the ability to have a community hosted on Podia that is open to everyone who’s purchased one of the courses. But right now I can’t do that.

9. DMCA & Scraper Support

There’s a bunch of platforms that scrape courses and re-sell them on the black market. I’d love some kind of automated detection of scraped course content and maybe like an easy copy/paste DMCA letter or something that you can send out. Would make playing whack-a-mole with these folks easier….

Anyway - despite all that I’ve had a great experience with Podia, I’d def recommend them.