Building an Event Tech Training Business - Jen Santos on Course Design, LMS Migration, and When Events Work
Jen Santos is the founder of Smart Event Academy, a training platform she built after the pandemic wiped out decades of institutional knowledge from the events industry. Her premise: when events fail, the technology is almost never the real problem. It's the people around it - the teams who don't know what they don't know, in an industry that has almost no formal training for newcomers.
In this episode, you'll learn:
→ Why event tech failures are a people and alignment problem - not a software problem
→ How Jen built a 68-lesson modular course and why she built the full program before creating any mini courses (counterintuitive, and she'll tell you why it worked)
→ How she prices for corporate agencies: seat-based, time-limited, and entirely B2B
→ When events actually make sense as a channel for membership organizations and associations - including the audience-size reality check most people skip
→ Why training events outperform summit formats, and what most borrowed-audience strategies get wrong
→ Her move from WordPress and LearnDash to LearnWorlds - what broke, what it cost, and how her platform costs dropped by roughly 75%
If you run a membership site, an association, or an eLearning platform - and you've wondered whether events belong in your growth strategy, or whether your LMS is working for you or against you - this is a practical conversation from someone who has lived both questions.
Connect with Jen:
Website: https://smarteventacademy.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenwaak/
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