What Teachable actually is
Teachable is a hosted platform for selling what you know. It gives you the website, the checkout and the place your students learn, all in one, so you don't have to stitch three different tools together yourself.
That's the short version. The longer version matters, because knowing what Teachable is built to do, and what it isn't, saves a lot of frustration later.
What you get
- A school. Your own site, on a Teachable address to start with and your own domain when you're ready. Everything you sell lives here.
- Things to sell. Online courses are the main event, but a school can also sell coaching, digital downloads and memberships.
- Pages. A page builder for your home page and sales pages, made from ready-made blocks you arrange and fill in.
- A checkout. Teachable takes the payment and pays you out, so you don't need to run a separate shop.
- A student area. Where students sign in, work through lessons and see their progress. You're reading a lesson in it now.
What it isn't
Teachable isn't a general website builder. It's built so that someone with no technical background can have a working school by the end of the day, and the price of that is choice. The design options are a theme, some colours and a set of blocks. Past that, the settings run out.
For most schools that's fine for a long time. Then the school grows, and you want it to do something the settings page has no checkbox for.
"The settings run out" doesn't mean "it can't be done". Code snippets, the HTML block in lessons, webhooks and the API all reach further than the settings do. That's what the rest of this course is about.
This lesson is the demo
- This is Teachable's standard lesson page. The only change is one code snippet that restyles it.
- The light and dark switch in the top bar works here, and it remembers the choice you made anywhere else on the site.
- If you picked an accent colour on the home page, it has followed you in.
- The text you're reading sits in an HTML block, which Teachable support will switch on for your school if you ask.
Where this course goes next
The rest of this section gets a school from nothing to taking its first payment. After that we set the school up properly, then move on to the parts that go past the settings: code snippets, Liquid, dark mode and theming, webhooks and the V2 API.
In short
- Teachable gives you a website, a checkout and a student area in one place.
- You can sell courses, coaching, digital downloads and memberships.
- The design settings are deliberately limited. Code and the API take you further.