Coaches, take your own course
Jul 11, 2026
I had a call last week with a coach who'd shut his membership down. When I asked him why, he told me Kajabi wasn't really fit for purpose.
Hmm, tricky one. I work with some of the biggest coaches in the world running their entire businesses on Kajabi, and it works for them just fine. So if it isn't working for you, then something else is going on. Let's have a look.
I spent an hour going through the build, and it wasn't pretty. Offers weren't connected to checkouts, automations weren't firing, reminder emails were in draft, and there were links pointing at nothing. On paper the membership existed, in practice it was a train wreck the moment anyone tried to use it, and members had already left the building.
He'd shut the whole thing down because he'd had no choice.
Now, this is where I'd normally write about the assistant who'd been trusted to build it all and hadn't managed it, and I'd write about vetting who you hire, the red flags to watch for, and the questions to ask before you delegate anything.
But that isn't really the story here.
The build going wrong was one problem, and it's a common enough one. There was another problem sitting underneath it, and it's the one that mostly gets missed.
Before a paying customer ever touches your product, two people need to have gone through the whole thing as customers themselves. The founder, and somebody else with fresh eyes.
Both of them, not one or the other, and I'll come to why in a minute. In his case, neither had happened, and that's why the wheels came off.
Start with the founder, which is you
You built the thing. You priced it, you marketed it, you sold it, and then you handed the delivery of it over to somebody you trusted. And at some point, quietly, without you really noticing it happening, you stopped being the client of your own product. You never went back and walked through it yourself as a paying customer would. Not from the click on the sales page, through the payment, into the welcome email, past the first login, into the member area, waiting for the notifications, checking the community, opening the whole thing up on the phone you actually carry around every day.
None of it.
Which means the first people to find every broken link, every missing email, and every dead-end checkout were the ones handing over their money. And paying customers rarely file a support ticket for the tenth thing that goes wrong. They just leave, and they don't come back, and you rarely find out why.
So the minimum, and I mean the absolute minimum, is that you walk through your own product as the customer, all the way through, every so often. Better you find the paper cuts than a paying client does.
Why you can't audit your own work
The second half of it is the more important one, and it's the one most coaches never get to. You cannot properly audit your own work. Nobody can. Whatever you've built, you already know how it's meant to feel, so you click straight past the things a stranger would trip over, and you fill in the blanks with what you meant to happen rather than what actually happens.
It's the same reason a novelist can't proofread their own manuscript, or a chef can't taste their own cooking after a fortnight in the kitchen. Your brain smooths the road that it already knows.
When your fingers reach for the button that should say "Enrol now" and it actually says "Start", you don't see it, because your brain reads what you meant to put there. When the welcome email opens with a broken merge tag your name never filled in, you skim past it, because in your head it works. When the checkout takes four steps and it should take two, you don't feel the friction, because you've walked the path a thousand times and worn a groove down the middle of it.
A first-time customer has no groove. Every click is new, and every click is a chance for them to give up and never come back.
The second pair of eyes
Which is why the smarter move, and honestly the one that separates the coaches who scale from the ones who lurch from fire to fire, is a second set of eyes on the whole thing. Somebody who has never seen the build before, going through it cold, at the pace and on the phone that a real customer would use. Not to test the tech, but to test the actual experience of using it.
This is exactly why Jules does what she does in our business. When we finish a build for a client, she's the one who buys her own way in, sits through the welcome sequence, waits for the notifications to land, and tries to break the whole thing on a phone at eleven o'clock at night. I handle the tech, and she handles the experience, and between us we cover both sides of the same question. Does it work, and does it actually feel like it works.
Back to the coach who shut his membership down
He'd hired somebody good, he'd trusted them, and he'd got on with the work he was actually paid to do, which is exactly what you're supposed to do as the person running the business.
The founder is always the last line of defence on the customer experience. Nobody else is going to feel the small paper cuts the way you do, and nobody else has any real reason to care whether the welcome email lands right on a Thursday morning.
And even once you have walked through it yourself, you still need a second pair of eyes on it, because you can't see the ones you've grown numb to.
So take your own course. Then have somebody with fresh eyes take it too.
If you're reading this with a slight sinking feeling about what you might find in your own build, that's the prompt. Better to look at it together than let a paying customer find it for you.
Frequently asked questions
Why should coaches walk through their own course as a customer?
Because you are the last line of defence on the user experience. The people who built it, delivered it, or hosted it won't feel the paper cuts a paying customer does. If you don't walk through it as a customer, the first people to find every broken link and missing email are the ones who paid you. And they don't come back.
Can a coach audit their own membership or course on their own?
Not properly. You already know how it's meant to feel, so your brain smooths past the things a stranger would trip over. It's the same reason you can't proofread your own writing. Walking through it yourself is the minimum. A second pair of fresh eyes is what actually catches the problems that lose you clients.
What is a UX audit for a coaching business?
A UX audit is somebody going through your product the way a real customer would. Buying in, sitting through the welcome sequence, waiting for the notifications, trying to log in on a phone. Not testing the tech, testing the experience. The question it answers is: does this work, and does it feel like it works.
Why do coaching memberships fail on platforms like Kajabi?
Almost never because the platform can't do the job. Kajabi runs some of the biggest coaching businesses in the world. Memberships fail when the build hasn't been properly connected up, and when nobody has walked through it end-to-end as a paying customer. The platform gets the blame. The gap in the process is the real cause.
How often should I audit my own course or membership?
At the very least, before every launch or relaunch, and any time you've changed something structural (a new checkout, a new email sequence, a new module, a new offer). Little tweaks add up. What worked six months ago may not work now, and small things break quietly. Better to catch them on a Thursday morning than mid-launch.
