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Your AI-Powered Launch Plan

TL;DR; A concrete, two-week plan for going from "we should have training" to "we shipped a course and are watching the data." This is what we recommend for a first Lupo course. Scale up from there.

Everything in the previous chapters is theory. This chapter is a practical plan — the shortest credible path from "let's do this" to "it's live and we're measuring."

This is the plan we'd recommend to a team spinning up their first course. Adjust to taste.

Before you start

You need:

  • A real topic. Something your team actually needs training on. Not a hypothetical. If you can't name a specific pain point that the course will address, go find one first — look at Broken Knowledge for ideas about where to look.
  • One person who owns it. Not a committee. One person whose job it is to get this course out the door. Committees produce slow courses.
  • A rough audience in mind. Who should take this? How many of them are there? Write the answer down before you start.

If you don't have any of the above, don't open Lupo yet — spend 30 minutes figuring out which course to build, then come back.

Day 1-2: Plan

Answer the four questions from Planning Your Course:

  1. Who is this for?
  2. What should they be able to do afterwards?
  3. What's the shortest path to get them there?
  4. How will you know if it worked?

Write the answers in a short document. Share it with one or two other people whose judgment you trust. Ask them: "Does this feel like the right thing to build?" Adjust based on their feedback.

Then draft a rough outline: three to five sections, two to five activities each. Keep the total course length under 30 minutes.

Day 3-4: Build the deck

Open PowerPoint. Build the slides for your course, section by section, using the outline.

A few tips:

  • Don't obsess over visual design on version 1. A clean template is enough. You can always pretty it up later.
  • One clear idea per slide. If a slide has five bullet points of unrelated stuff, it's actually five slides.
  • Speaker notes are the narration. As you build, write the narration directly in the speaker notes. Read each one aloud as you write. See Writing Scripts for the writing craft.

Time-box this. Two days is plenty for a first version. Don't let perfect be the enemy of shipping.

Day 5: Generate the videos

Upload your PowerPoint to Lupo — see Create Video From PowerPoint.

For the first pass, use the Smart model with a Standard voice. It's cheap, fast, and good enough to see what the result feels like. Generate all your videos.

Watch them. Not just skim — actually watch. Where does the narration sound weird? Where does the timing feel off? Where would a learner be confused?

Iterate:

  • Bad narration → edit the speaker notes in the .pptx, regenerate that slide.
  • Wrong pacing → adjust the narration speed (see Narrators).
  • Slide visually confusing → fix the slide, regenerate.
  • A slide that just doesn't work → delete it. Fewer is better.

Do this until the videos are good enough. Not perfect. Good enough.

Day 6-7: Build the course in the LMS

Create the course in Lupo's LMS (see Courses and Sections).

  • Set up sections matching your outline.
  • Create one Video activity per video.
  • Add a Reading activity at the top of the course with a short "welcome and why" message.
  • Add a Reading activity at the end with "what you just learned" and any next steps.
  • Save the course in Draft status. Don't publish yet.

You now have a real course. It's not live, but it exists.

Day 8-9: Pilot

Enroll five or six people you trust. Tell them it's a pilot and you want their honest feedback. Use Enrolling People in a Course.

Ask them to:

  • Take the whole course.
  • Tell you where they got confused.
  • Tell you what they would cut.
  • Tell you what's missing that they expected.

Wait. Don't nudge them more than once.

When the feedback comes in, believe them. Your pilot group is seeing the course for the first time; you're not. Their confusion is real, even if it feels unreasonable to you. Fix the things they flagged, even if you disagree.

Day 10: Polish and publish

Apply the pilot feedback. Re-generate any videos whose scripts changed. Re-test the whole course end to end.

Then:

  • Change the course status from Draft to Published.
  • Bulk-enroll the real audience (see Bulk Enroll With CSV).
  • Send a short announcement: here's a new course, here's why it exists, here's what you'll get, please finish by [date].

The course is live. Celebrate briefly. Then start watching the data.

Day 11-14: Watch and respond

Open Course Reports daily for the first week. You're looking for:

  • Completion rate. Is it trending up at a reasonable pace, or is it stalled?
  • Drop-off points. Is everyone finishing section 1 and then falling off in section 2? That's a signal — section 2 is the problem.
  • Confused learners. If anyone pings you asking "how do I do X in this course," take it seriously. One person asking usually means ten people wondering.

Fix things as they come up. Don't wait for a big post-mortem at the end of the month.

Week 4 and beyond

Set a reminder to check in on the course four to six weeks after launch. At that point, look at:

  • The completion rate. Did most of the audience finish?
  • The real outcome metric you defined in the plan. Is the thing you hoped would change actually changing?

Based on what you find, either:

  • Iterate. Fix the course, re-run the pilot, re-publish.
  • Leave it alone. It's working. Move on to the next course.
  • Kill it. If the course didn't work and iteration doesn't seem like it'll fix it, accept it and pull it down. A zombie course that no one uses and no one maintains is worse than no course at all.

The second course

Once you've shipped the first course, the second one is much easier. You know the tools, you know the shape, you know what works in your organization. Plan on 3-5 days for a second course, not two weeks.

By the time you're on your fifth or sixth course, you'll have built a library of training content that's actually useful, and the habit of capturing knowledge will be part of how your team works. That's the real goal.

Where to go next