Run a Paid Masterclass or Bootcamp

You have been meaning to run this for a while. Eight weeks, a small group, the thing you already explain to people one at a time for free.

The teaching is not what stops it happening. What stops it happening is everything around the teaching: agreeing a price with fourteen people separately, collecting from all of them, keeping track of who has actually paid, and then having somewhere for them to ask questions that is not your DMs at eleven at night.

Here is how to set that up once.

Decide what the cohort is

A cohort is a room with a price on the door and an end date in mind. On Trankets that is a community, and you have two decisions to make about it.

Where people talk. Either a WhatsApp or Telegram group you already run, or a room hosted here. For a paid programme, the room hosted here is usually the better call: there is no invite link that can be forwarded to someone who did not pay, and when access ends it ends properly.

How long one purchase buys. For an eight-week programme, set access to eight weeks. It is counted from when each person paid, so somebody who joins late still gets the full run.

Decide how people pay for it

Two routes, and the right one depends on how you are selling it.

Sell access on its own. The community gets its own page with its own price. Share that link anywhere: your bio, a post, a reply to someone asking what you charge. This is the straightforward option for a programme that is not attached to anything else.

Attach it to something you already sell. If your cohort opens with a live kickoff session, sell tickets to that event and attach the community to it. Everyone who buys a ticket is inside the room the moment they pay. Same if you sell a course and want buyers to get the discussion room with it.

Either way there is no separate charge for the room. The fee is the one that sale already carries, and nothing on top.

Keep the room manageable

The reason most people do not open a group is that they picture themselves refereeing it at midnight. So a new room starts in announcements mode: you post, everyone else reads, and there is nothing to moderate.

Open it up to full discussion when you are ready, and switch it back just as quickly if a conversation goes somewhere you would rather it did not.

A few other things worth knowing:

• Pin the one answer you keep repeating. Every cohort has a question that gets asked eleven times. Pin it once. Only one post can be pinned, on purpose, because a board with ten pinned posts has none.
• You do not have to be the only moderator. Appoint someone from the cohort to handle reports and removals.
• You choose whether the member count shows. A number that flatters you is proof; one that does not is a reason to leave. Small rooms hide it automatically.

Ending the cohort

When the programme finishes, close the room. Closing stops new people joining and frees the slot so you can open the next cohort, and nothing is deleted. If you want it back, open it again.

What you have afterwards

Fourteen people who paid you, in your contacts, alongside everyone who has ever bought anything from you.

Which is what makes cohort two different from cohort one. You are not looking for fourteen strangers again. You are emailing people who already did this once, and their friends, and telling them when the next one opens.